Resigning
I’ve resigned my position as a Staff Software Engineer.
For Christmas in 2008, combined as my birthday and graduation present (it being my senior year of High School), I received a Lenovo IdeaPad. Honestly, it was a total piece of crap. But it was something.
I was lucky that my High School offered some programming classes. It was here I got a formal introduction to HTML and CSS, learned basic logic using C++, and generally speaking was accepted for being a nerd. I took all the programming classes I could and by my senior year, armed with my own laptop, I was ready to take on some basic contract work. That same teacher connected me with a local business who needed basic help with their website. I honestly don’t even remember actually doing anything but I got paid a few hundred dollars and it felt really great to be rewarded financially for my computer skillz. Up until now it had mostly consisted of my mom yelling at me to “get off the computer”, now I had a boss yelling at me to “get on the computer”. Listen to your moms.
Some time later, around 2013, my friend had a job at a local Ruby on Rails contract shop. He told me of free lunches every Friday. Ping pong. Soda. It was like paradise. On top of that, they’d pay! Man that sounded pretty interesting. Growing up, I’d always had my nose in a linux terminal doing something or the other, modding an xbox. That friend let me know he recalled watching me work as kids and just couldn’t believe all the crazy text scrolling by actually meant something to me. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I really had no clue what I was doing and I was probably actively breaking my Ubuntu installation, but he remembered my tech skillz and encouraged me to apply.
I got that job, hired for $10 an hour as a part-time intern. They provided me with a Macbook which I’ve discussed elsewhere on this blog. At this time, I didn’t have a computer or internet connection due to being poor and my laptop being stolen during a home invasion. I actually did successfully crack my neighbor’s WEP password but it was too slow to be usable. I remember some of my first tasks at that job. There was some XML parsing that needed to happen and my mentor suggested possibly using regex to do it. Instead, I used Nokogiri to do a really good job because I found the now- infamous Stack Overflow post. They were really impressed with my work! I worked there for a year, getting small raises, going “full-time”. It was fantastic to work with Ruby! Compared to C++ it felt like kid mode. Rails made me cry a few times but a lot of that was due to using a then-state of the art frontend which consisted of AngularJS in HAML. Yes, HAML made me cry.
After a while, I figured I should do something about school. On a whim, I applied to Brigham Young University Being a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and a full one-tenth tithe payer, I figured I was already kind of paying tuition there so I might as well see if they’d let me go there. I got in! Which meant I quit my cool programming job. Moving from St. George up to Provo was tricky which I won’t go into here. But by the end of my first semester, I’d found a new internship that paid even more than my old gig! $18/hr! How did I find the gig? I’d love to tell you. I was in an “introduction to electrical engineering” class that they made everyone take. It was only half a credit, and it was supposed to open you up to the career possibilities with that degree. They would have guest speakers present to the class that had graduated from the program and now were working in the industry. It was always extremely important to me to be personally respectful and courteous to my teachers and presenters (not that I always was). As part of that, I would make a habit of complimenting the presenter or teacher, or simply thank them for their time. It was one such presenter who I thanked who responded by saying “You know we have open spots for internships” and pretty much that was it. I had to interview and do all of that but considering that I was technically a freshman, I was pretty proud to have just landed an internship!
That internship was okay. I had a cubicle. It was a hardware company and I wrote python code that would talk to the hardware via test fixtures to perform certain tests to ensure functionality. I was basically QA for firmware. It was fun, I got to write some lower-level python code to talk to an FTDI chip. But I grew frustrated by the antiquated practices that are a bit necessary in the legacy/industrial hardware space. I remembered the days of having CI auto deploy your code within a few minutes and longed for that flexibility. They also made me use a freakin’ desktop windows 7 box with spinning rust. It was such a piece of crap. I’m not going to lie, at least part of the reason I quit was because I hated that computer.
BYU has a really great STEM career fair twice a year. I love that place. I’d go every year just to see what people were doing. Some companies looked so pathetic and lame. Some looked scary like the CIA. Some seemed cool! I ended up talking to a rep from one of the companies who was a web developer recruiting interns. Perfect fit! I’m actually still in contact with that person and that makes me happy. After going through the interview process again, I got a new internship! This one paid even better, I think maybe $21/hr. That felt like stupid money. Oh and this place paid holidays too, and they let me work part time during school to support my family. BYU and Latter-Day Saints are a little intense in that we tend to have kids very young, before we’re done with college or have a career or have a house. It seems to work out okay, most of the time. I was no exception.
That was a great internship but it was a startup that was getting maybe a little too long in the tooth and was having some hard time shaking of some old-school practices that I found just kind of grating. I’m not going to lie, at least a part of the reason I quit was because I had to use IntelliJ which I just hated. I’m crazy.
There was another company that some of the people from the internship company had left recently to go full-time on. They just so happened to be a Rails shop. I ended up joining as maybe developer #6, I know at one point I was officially employee #13. That was quite a leap up, I was able to negotiate a salary of something like 78k/yr with health insurance. I had no clue how I’d ever spend that much money. That startup was a great experience for me, and I grew with the company until we were in the hundreds. But VC money is a tale as old as time and I’m not going to rehash that here. I started as technically a part-time intern but quickly had opportunities to have a huge impact so going full-time made sense to me. This meant dropping out of BYU.
Let me digress here to say I had initially enrolled in BYU’s Electrical Engineering program but very quickly realized that I was not cut out for a physics-based approach to electricity. A week into my second semester, after staring completely blankly at my first calculus homework, I broke. It was late. I was laying in bed with my wife, who was asleep being exhausted from taking care of our 3 month old baby. “There’s just no way I can do this.” What do I do? Drop out? Work at Jiffy Lube? I browsed the list of majors offered by BYU. I sorted by ones that didn’t require Calculus. Of the slim options, two stood out. Journalism, and “Technology and Engineering Education”. I recalled my high school teacher and the experiences I had and felt like that was a good move. Within the next 30 minutes, I’d completely dropped all my Electrical Engineering pre-reqs and switched to the new major.
I never did great in school. Seeing how smart my kids are now, I realize I really was kind of stupid. Just comparing the books I’d read and my emotional maturity compared to my kids, it’s clear to see I struggled. I deal with a fair amount of anxiety which results in emotional collapse in the form of crying to myself or explosive rage in rare and extreme cases. In grade school, I’d just get confused, overwhelmed, and cry. I remember my 3rd grade teacher telling me “Dave, instead of crying, you should just raise you hand and ask for help. I want to help you.” I still really struggle with that.
The first day I walked into my first class in that new major, school stopped being school and started being cool. There were still hard things. I had a woodshop class that brought me to my knees, and I cried. But man, the end-table I designed and manufactured over the course of that class is literally one of my most prized possessions! I made great friends, many I’m still in touch with today. I had great professors. Everything was perfect. Everyone was happy. Things were awesome.
My wife was pregnant with our second, we’d just moved into a bigger home to accommodate all of us and I was feeling the crunch of our $900/mo rent. I had a great job and a good opportunity to go full time, so I took it. Do I regret it? I don’t think so. I dropped out of school. The experiences I had at that job really helped set me up to have a very successful career.
After a few years running that startup gauntlet, the corporate bull-crap started seeping in just like it always has. I started getting restless. I like building things and helping people. Responding to messages asking why a team member with children in the NICU were low on story points that week does neither. I refuse waste my precious time.
This was my first real, formal attempt at the open job market. I just started looking around on random jobs websites. We were into the lockdown period at that time so it seemed like there were a lot of good jobs out there. I ended up with a few pretty attractive offers that I had a hard time turning down.
Like most of us, I’ve been reading Hacker News pretty much daily for the duration of my programming career. Who doesn’t take a peek at the monthly “Who’s Hiring?” After a quick “cmd+f Rails”, I found a small startup based out of Palo Alto was looking for Rails/Vue devs. That was my bread and butter! The whole “Palo Alto startup” aspect was quite intimidating. At that point, my exposure to silicon valley was entirely based on the TV show. Honestly is it even that far off?
I joined that startup in September 2020, about two weeks after my third son was born. Joining a fully remote company based out of “Silicon Valley” felt very strange. It took about 3 months for me to believe it wasn’t some kind of elaborate scam. The founding team made the workplace really incredible. They had genuinely fun company activities, like virtual escape rooms, or cooking classes where they’d mail you all the supplies. It was really, really awesome. After about a year there, they sold to a publicly traded company in the same space. My options converted to shares in the public company which would vest over a 3 year period equally. I mean, I always treat options when joining a company where I don’t have direct access to the bank account as pretty much “monopoly money”. It was still monopoly money, but at least I could theoretically see how much of it I owned.
Just before the year came and went, something unexpected happened. The public company was bought out wholesale by a private equity firm! I didn’t even know that was a thing! The shares of the company were not doing incredibly well, and the strike price of the acquisition ended up being mildly life-changing amount of money for me. Not private jet money and my kids have never left the continental United States. However, it was enough to completely pay off all my debts except for my mortgage, and put me in a great position there as well. It also left me with a really chill, stable, remote job.
I was able to move back to St. George. Literally all my wildest dreams came true. This was the grind I always fought for. I started joking that moving back to St. George was the retirement plan but that happened too soon so I needed to figure something else out.
A few years passed. The founding team moved on. I still had good coworkers but the work was not meaningful. Keeping an acquisition on life support pays well but is relatively stressful and is very unfulfilling. I could go into this more, but I’ll leave it at that.
I broke. Life is too short. Frankly, I’m too smart and too talented to waste my time doing anything except my absolute potential. I have no impact or connection to my local community. I sit alone all day. Yet everywhere I go, I’m reminded how lucky I am, how rich I must be, how sweet it must be to work from home. And it is, it really is. But that’s not what life is about.
My plan is to go finish my teaching degree and teach high school. I want to teach kids how to use technology to make their lives more fulfilling and enriching. We need to understand media literacy. People criticize the kids these days because “the number 1 job is youtuber”. I want to teach kids how to be YouTubers. Not because they will become YouTubers, but knowing how to take advantage of video production technology, media publishing, and software will make their lives better. I want to teach kids how to blog. Frankly, I want to teach literally anything. I’d look forward to the opportunity to teach Driver’s Education.
I’m going to start substitute teaching since I can do that right away. I will show up and do a great job as I always do and the doors will open. There will be setbacks. It will be hard. I’m walking away from a staff-level salary and I’m the sole breadwinner. That’s terrifying, literally horrifying. But I have to try! I’ve been really successful at pretty much everything I’ve even accidentally tried to do and I think I can use my cunning and wit to make it work.
I’ve been writing on this site for at least the last 10 years. I mean honestly, I’m pretty much the same dude I was back then. Maybe I have more random crap now but at the end of the day I like to read wikipedia on my phone and write blog posts, you know? I built up all this stuff to make my life more bearable but there’s no substitute for passion. It’s not off to greener pastures. I’m not even sure if there is a pasture. I’m just going boldly where nobody else has gone before - into my future.