I’ve decided to the join the flock. That probably doesn’t mean anything to a whole lot of people except perhaps those in the engineering community, but “joining the flock” is Twitter parlance for joining their company. A little bit of background about me for new readers: Back in 2013, I took a leap of faith and left my life as a lawyer and a highly profitable law firm to go back into software engineering at a small silicon valley startup *(See here). At the time I left, my life at the law firm had ironically increased my tolerance for risk because of how unenjoyable the work was. I honestly felt that any non-law opportunity, even if it had a dubious potential upside, would be better than grueling it out for several more years only to enter into an in-house counsel gig. In retrospect, I didn’t even want the position of in-house counsel; I think I was just looking for meaningful work and better work-life balance without having to be electronically tethered to my phone.
In the following months after leaving big law, I drank from the proverbial firehose. It’s hard to overstate the degree to which the software engineering community and tools had changed within the past few years. I had missed much. While it felt good to be programming again, I constantly battled feeling overwhelmed with relearning old coding techniques, digesting new paradigms and finding my place in the software community again. I remember picking up javascript for the first time in years and thinking to myself how foreign everything looked. Playing around in jquery, seeing all the dollar signs, variable names without associated types, and nested callbacks and closures made my head spin. However, after overcoming that initial shock, things started quickly becoming familiar again. Coding eight to ten hours a day definitely fast-tracked my improvement as a software engineer in ways that coding on my own after normal working hours while I was with the law firm couldn’t.
Not too soon after I joined the startup did I begin searching out different opportunities. There was no real impetus towards my search; rather it was exploratory in nature. There was nothing that I particularly disliked about the startup, however I knew it wasn’t a place where I could really thrive. It was a small shop laden with past encumbrances that it couldn’t shake and simply wasn’t in a position for growth. Subsequently, I landed at a large hardware/software company in the networking market segment where I set to work on more interesting and difficult engineering problems. Essentially, the type of work I was doing at this company is what I’ve been blogging about for the past several months. The software issues I dealt with were engaging. I built an analytics stack from the ground up, and spent a good bit of time figuring out how to scaling the analytics processing and increasing node.js and mongoDB performance, and had fun developing the logical software frameworks and architecture to improve my software’s maintainability and scalability. In short, it was a great experience, and I was thriving at the company.
So then why did I leave? There are a few reasons: First, Sallie Mae. As all you lawyers can relate, law school is insanely expensive. Second, my company only deals in the enterprise space, which isn’t very exciting. I used to joke with my coworker that on the day we had one user using the software suite, we would have cause for celebration. Third, this past year and a half has been … awkward for me. I’ve gone from being deeply invested in the law to deeply invested in software engineering. I’ve grown much faster in this past year in my software engineering ability and competence than I have at any other part in my career (and maybe life), in part because of my dedication to software engineering and becoming a better engineer, but also vastly due to me simply remembering old techniques, design patterns, abstract data types, and software methodology that I had forgotten. Spending the majority of my free time coding has also certainly propelled me much further than just my day job alone. The crux is that it’s been a struggle to find where I belong back in the community of software engineers. My resume still remains a source of question and curiosity to both recruiters and interviewers alike. It probably will continue for the long run. Thus, at least in this hot economy for software engineers, it’s been difficult to estimate my market value when dealing with so many variables. I don’t blame prospective employers for having questions when reviewing a candidate like me. As I’ve come back up to speed though, my market value has risen and I’ve been hungry for new challenges.
I know that I’ll get left behind again if I don’t continue pushing myself in my free time. While it’s my belief that there will always be a great market for great software engineers, I recognize that dropping from great to good to mediocre can happen quickly through complacency. And apparently, the reverse is true through hard work and natural ability. In essence, software engineering is the path I’ve chosen and I’m pot-committed. I threw away a promising career in law that I didn’t love to do what I do love now, and I intend to see it through to my maximum ability. And that means I want to be at a company where I can push and be pushed in engineering quality and knowledge, where my weekend work and exploration helps me develop my edge and promotes my future, and where excellence is recognized by the company. I think I’ve found it with Twitter. Twitter’s engineering team is outstanding; their employees are young, hungry and eager to learn and do great things. Twitter as a platform has also not peaked (in my opinion), so there are great opportunities for growth within the company. Although Twitter is much bigger than some of the other startups that I’ve considered, there is still the opportunity to dive in and do impactful things at the company. I’m definitely looking forward to the first hack week.
Lastly, now that I’m fully integrated back into the software community, there’s perhaps a greater penchant for financial conservatism. I’m getting older, but my debt acts as an albatross around my neck, so it’ll be nice to have some financial security for a change. I should also say that many startups in the valley also have excellent engineering teams and hiring standards and are solving interesting issues. Yet many of those startups do not enjoy public recognition of that fact, so recruiters can’t easily get a good gauge of the caliber of engineer. At a large company like Twitter, Google or Facebook, the software engineers enjoy the reputation of having survived the interview gauntlet. In other words, such engineers are generally of high quality and will be known as such. While I still have the desire to do things on my own such as exploring the intersections of law and software engineering, I see no reason that such a goal is mutually exclusive with working at a large software company. I’ll continue doing what I’ve always done, spending my time improving my skills, building tools that may or may not have merit, but always and ceaselessly bettering myself.
Code and Codes 