Written November-December 2021
A bunch of semi-connected thoughts grouped broadly by the concept of time. This is less of an essay and more of a stream of consciousness. I'll get better at this, I promise!
Soundtrack for this blog : 🎧 Pink Floyd - Time
Roger Waters from Pink Floyd got the idea for the song when he realized he was no longer preparing for anything in life but was right in the middle of it at the age of 29. Coincidentally, that’s how old I am right now. With the pandemic, I’ve done a bit of a speedrun toward a lot of life milestones typically considered for those of my generation - got married, closed on a house, and had my first child. There’s of course tons of work ahead for my wife and I with these things, but I’m more cognizant than ever for my need to keep preparing for things in life. There needs to be more milestones to look forward to. Many of my friends are approaching life at a different pace, so it’s difficult to imagine what else I should be striving for. At the moment, the low hanging fruit is my career. But there's so much more to life than work!
My wife wants to stop working one day so that she can take care of our son Elliot full time. In order to get there, we've talked about where I want to be in my career in the next N years. Honestly, before 2020, I really never thought about where I wanted to be in 3-5 years. I was floating through my career - once I finished my undergrad in comp sci I figured - become a developer, get to senior after a few years, and then ???. I never really had much of a plan for my life before we started dating. Half-seriously, Kim and I drafted a Google Doc contract for the two of us in our first years of dating which had a timeline going up to our early 30s. And we’ve done a pretty damn good job at meeting or exceeding the plans we laid out!
At my last job at Grailed, I spent a lot of time chatting with my coworker Cliff about where I want to be in the next few years to plan how we can best help each other get there. I really appreciated his constant forward thinking that clearly came from his experience and wanting to help others grow. Having read so much in 2021 about this, I’ve come to realize just how critical coming up with a game plan is to actually making tangible improvements. Anything else is just luck. In 2022, I plan on coming up with a real road map for myself for the future. I started a new job as a Lead Data Engineer at Disney Streaming - i want to soak up as much knowledge as I can in the next few months in both working in a slightly different role at a much larger scale than I've ever worked before. This is just the right pressure cooker of an opportunity to get me to understand how to become a Staff or Principal level engineer. From there, well, we'll see!
Sidebar, I have the terrible habit of getting amazing advice from my wife and it not really sticking with me until I hear it from another person. I’d save a ton of time (and make her happy!) if I just listened to her right away! She was telling me this shit back in 2019!
From daedtech - it’s incredibly easy to become an advanced/expert beginner in anything you do - gaming, your career, relationships, etc. If you’re not consciously making an effort to reach the next level, you’re going to plateau and spend so much longer at that plateau than you really should. Life is too short for that! Why spend months, years on an aimless path when others have already figured out the problems you're trying to solve by yourself really poorly?
Folks tend to reach the Senior level as an engineer purely by having clocked in the appropriate number of years. Maybe there was some deliberate energy expended on trying to get promoted here and there, but the pathway from junior to mid level to senior is a linear one. Once you're looking at management or especially the IC level, the pathway becomes pretty abstract! Staff engineer can be a lofty unclear goal to place for oneself and the goals beyond that (Senior Staff? L8 or L9 at FAANG?) afterwards are even more abstract.
I’m currently in the process of figuring out what a Staff or Principal engineer pathway looks like for myself, but what happens after that is a complete mystery to me.
Time is a resource that quickly goes away more and more as you get older. As a kid, I used to be able to spend 6-8 hours a day playing videogames with my friends afterschool and on the weekends. College and work were far on the horizon as was a family. Now that I work fulltime and have a wife & son, the structure of my day has completely changed. There’s a ton of things to do on the day-to-day chore side of things, and there’s also lot’s to do on the long term responsibility side of things as well - home maintenance and improvements, career progression, relationships, etc. If I am playing a videogame or some other hobby, the time has to be a bit more structured. It’s really important to prevent burn out by giving yourself time for leisure, but you can’t let the Instant Gratification Monkey win every time.
Doing the right thing at the right time is important. Do I really need to wash a toy for elliot if he’s crying right now? Do I need to wash his bottles first, or Kim's pumping stuff first? One clearly needs to be done before the other for work the next day. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like there are deadlines to the little things or chores in life, but the time you spend dawdling is time you take away from your future time-sensitive tasks. You’d have more time later to do them if you didn’t do the unimportant stuff so slowly.
Going back to waitbutwhy's blog on procrastination & the Instant Gratification Monkey, The point about the Instant Gratification Monkey leading us into a dark playground resonated with me super hard. My main hobby is playing competitive videogames (e.g. Valorant, Tekken or Starcraft). When I was in the dark playground I would always play so much worse in ranked matches. This was on a subconscious level - feeling fine on the surface but making sloppy mistakes that would tilt me and cause me to lose. I recognized independently a few years ago that when I’m playing games when I shouldn’t be that I’m bound for disappointment and failure, and that’s been helpful for dissuading me from reaching for gaming when I should be taking care of Responsibilities with a capital R. It’s still easy to fall into other time sinks like YouTube and Twitter though, where the dopamine hits are readily available and there’s nothing to lose. I think that’s why those habits can be hard to break for myself and many others - there’s not really any short-term negative consequences for watching Rugrats PS1 Lore videos or scrolling through eSports drama for a game you tangentially follow on twitter. At least games have some kind of a feedback loop (losing MMR) to take you away from it psychologically.
Going back to the importance of self-improvement...
Improving your performance at work is no different than improving how you live day to day. Honestly, no one’s going to know if you’re half assing shit. Everyone's remote but even if we weren't you don't have someone hovering behind you tracking your performance relative to some metric you're expected to match. You are only fooling yourself at the end of the day when you slack. Most 10x people are there because everyone else is operating at 0.1x levels. Those coworkers aren’t going to be doing that forever ideally. They will realize, like you, that they are wasting time. If not they probably aren’t the best colleagues to have in the long run. You’ll feel better about your output if you’re cognizant of your time spent at work. It's 8 hours of your life you are giving to this place, why spend that third of your day just dicking around? If you hate the job, they don’t pay enough, why are you wasting your time there? You should be finding a job that provides more utility to you, whether it pays more, you learn more, gives you the warm fuzzies, whatever.
It’s not easy to Just Do It. There are numerous blockers in our lives outside of our control. But our number one enemy is our own inertia, our own mind. We rationalize time wasted because it’s comfortable. Our brains seek stability and comfort but at the expense of our own future happiness. In a way, depression or laziness is like a comfortable blanket holding us in place.
You’re only delaying your own progression, your own happiness. Each day spent at a job you hate is a day not spent doing something you enjoy. The financial or mental health benefits rack up exponentially in the long run.
But waiting for something or someone to happen in your life to snap you out of your current state is truly and absolutely not the way to live one’s life. We have agency. That person or thing might never show up.
We often have to create the opportunity for that person or thing to show up in our lives. My wife helps me an incredible amount, but i still had to show up at the metaphorical gym in order for her to help me out. Waiting for your boss to just promote you or give you some important work that changes your life is giving up on yourself and having control of what happens to you.
That isn't to say that I'm perfect and I do all of the stuff I'm preaching about in this entry. We're human, we fuck up. But it's important to just fuck up a little less every time and improve. Otherwise, you're going to just end up realizing that you're unhappy with where you are in life and play a very long game of catch up.
Appendix
http://paulgraham.com/vb.html - Life is Short, Jan 2016
An excellent blog article on the fleeting nature of life. The highlight that changed my way of thinking instantly:
Having kids showed me how to convert a continuous quantity, time, into discrete quantities. You only get 52 weekends with your 2 year old. If Christmas-as-magic lasts from say ages 3 to 10, you only get to watch your child experience it 8 times. And while it's impossible to say what is a lot or a little of a continuous quantity like time, 8 is not a lot of something. If you had a handful of 8 peanuts, or a shelf of 8 books to choose from, the quantity would definitely seem limited, no matter what your lifespan was.
How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You) — Wait But Why
I thought that this graphic from a tweet by WaitButWhy & this blog article were really good.
Screengrabs and quotes taken from Noboyuki Fukumoto's Kaiji manga & anime (incredible, really just incredible).
How Developers Stop Learning: Rise of the Expert Beginner
Another link to the post by daedtech. I really enjoyed the thought that went into explaining this concept!