What Happens in Tech...
I arrived in the Bay Area around 3 and half years ago. I wish I had arrived under better circumstances.
It's a story that is familiar to my recurring readers, but I ended up newly single and needing a change of scenery from that of Southern California, where I had lived for the better part of a decade. After traveling up and down the west coast, I realized that, if I wanted to get a tech job, it made the most sense for me to try my hand at settling in the Bay Area. It would afford me not only the most options, but the most interesting ones as well.
This was an odd time in my life. Everything that I owned was crammed into my car, and while I was able to find places to stay each night, it effectively felt as though I was living out of the damned thing. Among the more prototypical experiences, I spent a week at an AirBnB in San Pablo, on the north side of the East Bay. I was staying in a room that was being offered up for free by the owner of the house to an immigrant Chinese lady in her 60's, who was renting out the room for extra money while living in an RV she owned parked in the driveway.
My last night staying there, she came into my room in her nightgown and crawled under the sheets with me, in some half-hearted, passive attempt to seduce me. I politely declined her offer; there's probably no shortage of men who would jump at the chance to bed a woman close to twice their age, especially when they haven't had what former President Clinton called "relations" with anyone for over a year. But I'm not a hypersexual being and tend to be picky about whom I engage with.
The following morning, I was actually in the front yard of this house doing an initial phone screen with a company for a software engineering position. The lady came out to apologize for her behavior the night before in the middle of my phone call, and I had to bat her off while trying to answer some question being posed to me about algorithms. This ended up working out, because the company I was interviewing with ended up hiring me and I've been working there for the last few years.
In short, I found that if you're newly, unexpectedly single in your mid-30's and you strike out on the open road to take a big bite of contemporary Americana, life sort of feels like a Coen brothers film: you encounter a lot of odd, quirky, offbeat people, and while things are happening at a steady pace, there doesn't seem to be any discernible plot, nor any thread connecting all these events. To maintain an upbeat attitude, you develop a healthy appreciation for the absurd...which, come to think of it, isn't a strategy that is without merit in any circumstance.
I ended up booking an AirBnB in Palo Alto, right on the main road that connects the cities of Silicon Valley to one another: El Camino Real. I arrived late in the evening after a day of interviewing, and one of the other house guests let me in, offered me a beer, chatted me up for a bit, and told about his visiting from Germany, as well as his own role in the local tech industry. It was the first passably "normal" conversation I had had with anyone my own age and working in my own industry for several months.
Coming off this high of normality I went for a stroll in the neighborhood behind the house, which was a neighborhood known as Barron Park. I didn't learn until much later that this neighborhood was the location of the original "Facebook house" that Zuckerberg and his crew occupied when they first relocated to the Bay Area to grow their little social networking site. At some point I walked back to check out this house and saw it for its banality. If you've seen The Social Network you might imagine there was some glamour to living in that house; this is only possible with hindsight bias. Wherever you are in the world, doing any startup is like most other jobs: long stretches of the mundane, infused with only the occasional respite of the unusual, unexpected, or delightful.
The host of the AirBnB was an engineer at Tesla, which was about a mile away from the house. After four years of working there, the week I stayed there, he happened to be leaving his job to take a sabbatical, during which he would buy an RV and attempt to live off the grid for a few months. The AirBnB he was running in the house was actually fairly lucrative, so he offered me his room for a song (which was the furnished garage) in exchange for continuing to turn down the other rooms in the house as the other guests came and went. His sabbatical of a few months turned into an indefinite leave from Tesla, and I ended up staying in this house for a year and a half.
Some context might help: it was an odd little house situated in a commercial zone right behind a Thai Restaurant and adjacent to a 24-hour donut shop. By this I mean the front lawn of the house was the parking lot of the Thai place, bordered on the other side by the donut shop. Adjacent to it was a little strip mall with a couple of restaurants, a liquor store, and a little grocery store run by an adorable immigrant man who seemed to source his inventory from whatever other foreign and exotic discount outlets were throwing out for past-date expiration health code reasons.
It was a weird little pocket of Palo Alto to live in, but it had a quaint charm to it. My father is fond of telling me about a house he lived in during his last year of college, where he lived in the basement sleeping on a cot, which was balls cold in the dead of winter, and where the refrigerator needed to be sealed shut with the reinforcement of a bungie cord wrapped around it. It sounded like a corner of the third circle of Hell, but he always spoke so nostalgically about it. I seem to have inherited his ability to take whatever odd, seemingly unpleasant situation I find myself living in, take everything in stride, and make it a place I'm happy to call home.
The house was about a mile from Stanford, so the guests coming in and out tended to follow the academic cycles of that place. The second semester I was living there (and I never thought any time I spent in my 30's would be chunked in time increments of "semesters") I shared the house with two engineers from the University of Waterloo in Canada who were interning at Tesla. During my stay here, I tended to keep the house very clean, but during the few months they lived with me, the house was a constant sty of a collegiate order. (I won't go into how challenging it was as a mid-30-something to bring dates back to the house and explain to them what on earth was happening.) Parties were held with some regularity. I came home one Friday evening to find the place packed and a game of beer pong happening on the kitchen counter, and while I eschewed partying with them on almost every occasion, I engaged this once and managed to hold my own in the game, despite having not played in well over a decade.
This was a refreshing break from the humdrum routine of adult life that most people find themselves in post-university, but I found myself wondering exactly what mistake or set of mistakes I had made to find myself living as a 34-year-old with a bunch of college kids. Looking back, I recognize now that I was gainfully employed and making a good wage, so I'm not sure what inertia kept me living there for as long as I did. I suspect I was still incubating after leaving life in SoCal. (And it wasn't all partying; one of the students was a really good cook, and I have fond memories with him of making pizza from scratch one afternoon while rocking out to ABBA.)
After this time, I had a brief stint of a few months of living in an apartment in Mountain View...about which, due to complete mediocrity, I need not say anything at all. I then relocated to what Bay Area locals call "the city", which is more broadly known as San Francisco, where I have been for the last year and half. I have only recently started to branch out into the city, exploring it on foot in a haphazard, serendipitous way. One day, while wandering through North Beach, I happened upon a random staircase that stretched far and away up into some trees. It looked like it might take me where the beanstalk took Jack in the old fairy tale. I ascended the steep staircase, quickly rising to some gorgeous panoramic views of the city, and ultimately ended up finding myself at Coit Tower, a destination I had been meaning to check out. (Someone recently clued me in to the fact that these were the Filbert Street Steps.)
Such is San Francisco. I think you could spend five years here, exploring the various nooks and crannies, and you probably wouldn't be able to find all of the hidden gems in that time. I have more than half a mind to do this, since I can't leave the house without finding some corner of the city I love. As jaded as I have become about the Bay Area tech scene, and despite the fact that this is what the city is most well-known for, I have recently found that there is a good deal more to the city than just tech, and much of it is worth taking the time to uncover.
I write all of this in reflection, to understand where I've been, and to get a more concrete sense of where I ought to go. The company I work for recently laid off a significant portion of its employees. (It feels a little odd to work for a company where that sort of thing counts as national news.) I came out of the process still having a job, and in the wake, the team I am on has been restructured to be one that offers some exciting prospects with opportunities to build cool new things. Despite this, I tendered my resignation with the company yesterday. I've found myself stagnated. The problems I'm solving, the code I'm writing, all of it resembles the code I wrote when I first started 3 and a half years ago. I've ceased learning new things as a matter of course and become comfortable. If that's not a sure sign that you're about to jump the shark as a tech professional, I can't think of a better one. It would be easy to stay and continue doing the work, but easy has always been a more terrifying prospect to me than that of the unknown.
Slightly more than this, I went on a first date with a girl last weekend (my first in a long while), and this resulted in some forced perspective. I found her to be an all-around lovely person, and while conversation seemed to flow along happily, there was a shift in her demeanor about an hour in, and shortly thereafter she recused herself from our date because she had to "return some library books". (For me, this was a new one, and it's rich enough that I'm going to steal it for politely ditching future first dates.) It's always impossible to know why you don't click with someone, because it more than likely has absolutely nothing to do with you, and even if it does, it would be silly to attempt to change yourself in accordance with anyone else's possible wishes. But, this encounter did make me self-reflective, and I realized something critically important: I have lost sight of myself. As a man, as a human being, as a potential force for good in the world, as someone who will stand for something, as a person who proactively eases the burden of his fellow humans, as a steward of the joy that this world offers to us and that we are responsible for sharing with others, as a visionary who will take responsiblity for making the world what he feels it ought to be. Whether or not I have ever truly had sight of myself is probably debatable, but I have found myself accepting that I must now do the hard work of bringing my own self into focus and following whatever trajectory that puts me on.
Among all else going on, my younger brother and his wife are expecting their first child in the next couple of days. In the span of the next week, I will become an uncle. The mere thought of this, and of meeting this little baby for the first time, actually brings me more happiness than I ever thought it would.
If I have one key shortcoming as a Bay Area tech dude, it is that I do what so many out-of-the-gate startup failures attempt to do: copy some successful version of the past, instead of taking a chance on doing anything altogether new. The past can serve as inspiration, it can offer instruction, but it can never function as a step-by-step guide. You have to live believing that the world is imbued with many worthwhile things that remain undiscovered, some unknown not only to you but also to all of humanity, and to enthusiastically dive into the search of uncovering them.
It's a story that is familiar to my recurring readers, but I ended up newly single and needing a change of scenery from that of Southern California, where I had lived for the better part of a decade. After traveling up and down the west coast, I realized that, if I wanted to get a tech job, it made the most sense for me to try my hand at settling in the Bay Area. It would afford me not only the most options, but the most interesting ones as well.
This was an odd time in my life. Everything that I owned was crammed into my car, and while I was able to find places to stay each night, it effectively felt as though I was living out of the damned thing. Among the more prototypical experiences, I spent a week at an AirBnB in San Pablo, on the north side of the East Bay. I was staying in a room that was being offered up for free by the owner of the house to an immigrant Chinese lady in her 60's, who was renting out the room for extra money while living in an RV she owned parked in the driveway.
My last night staying there, she came into my room in her nightgown and crawled under the sheets with me, in some half-hearted, passive attempt to seduce me. I politely declined her offer; there's probably no shortage of men who would jump at the chance to bed a woman close to twice their age, especially when they haven't had what former President Clinton called "relations" with anyone for over a year. But I'm not a hypersexual being and tend to be picky about whom I engage with.
The following morning, I was actually in the front yard of this house doing an initial phone screen with a company for a software engineering position. The lady came out to apologize for her behavior the night before in the middle of my phone call, and I had to bat her off while trying to answer some question being posed to me about algorithms. This ended up working out, because the company I was interviewing with ended up hiring me and I've been working there for the last few years.
In short, I found that if you're newly, unexpectedly single in your mid-30's and you strike out on the open road to take a big bite of contemporary Americana, life sort of feels like a Coen brothers film: you encounter a lot of odd, quirky, offbeat people, and while things are happening at a steady pace, there doesn't seem to be any discernible plot, nor any thread connecting all these events. To maintain an upbeat attitude, you develop a healthy appreciation for the absurd...which, come to think of it, isn't a strategy that is without merit in any circumstance.
I ended up booking an AirBnB in Palo Alto, right on the main road that connects the cities of Silicon Valley to one another: El Camino Real. I arrived late in the evening after a day of interviewing, and one of the other house guests let me in, offered me a beer, chatted me up for a bit, and told about his visiting from Germany, as well as his own role in the local tech industry. It was the first passably "normal" conversation I had had with anyone my own age and working in my own industry for several months.
Coming off this high of normality I went for a stroll in the neighborhood behind the house, which was a neighborhood known as Barron Park. I didn't learn until much later that this neighborhood was the location of the original "Facebook house" that Zuckerberg and his crew occupied when they first relocated to the Bay Area to grow their little social networking site. At some point I walked back to check out this house and saw it for its banality. If you've seen The Social Network you might imagine there was some glamour to living in that house; this is only possible with hindsight bias. Wherever you are in the world, doing any startup is like most other jobs: long stretches of the mundane, infused with only the occasional respite of the unusual, unexpected, or delightful.
The host of the AirBnB was an engineer at Tesla, which was about a mile away from the house. After four years of working there, the week I stayed there, he happened to be leaving his job to take a sabbatical, during which he would buy an RV and attempt to live off the grid for a few months. The AirBnB he was running in the house was actually fairly lucrative, so he offered me his room for a song (which was the furnished garage) in exchange for continuing to turn down the other rooms in the house as the other guests came and went. His sabbatical of a few months turned into an indefinite leave from Tesla, and I ended up staying in this house for a year and a half.
Some context might help: it was an odd little house situated in a commercial zone right behind a Thai Restaurant and adjacent to a 24-hour donut shop. By this I mean the front lawn of the house was the parking lot of the Thai place, bordered on the other side by the donut shop. Adjacent to it was a little strip mall with a couple of restaurants, a liquor store, and a little grocery store run by an adorable immigrant man who seemed to source his inventory from whatever other foreign and exotic discount outlets were throwing out for past-date expiration health code reasons.
It was a weird little pocket of Palo Alto to live in, but it had a quaint charm to it. My father is fond of telling me about a house he lived in during his last year of college, where he lived in the basement sleeping on a cot, which was balls cold in the dead of winter, and where the refrigerator needed to be sealed shut with the reinforcement of a bungie cord wrapped around it. It sounded like a corner of the third circle of Hell, but he always spoke so nostalgically about it. I seem to have inherited his ability to take whatever odd, seemingly unpleasant situation I find myself living in, take everything in stride, and make it a place I'm happy to call home.
The house was about a mile from Stanford, so the guests coming in and out tended to follow the academic cycles of that place. The second semester I was living there (and I never thought any time I spent in my 30's would be chunked in time increments of "semesters") I shared the house with two engineers from the University of Waterloo in Canada who were interning at Tesla. During my stay here, I tended to keep the house very clean, but during the few months they lived with me, the house was a constant sty of a collegiate order. (I won't go into how challenging it was as a mid-30-something to bring dates back to the house and explain to them what on earth was happening.) Parties were held with some regularity. I came home one Friday evening to find the place packed and a game of beer pong happening on the kitchen counter, and while I eschewed partying with them on almost every occasion, I engaged this once and managed to hold my own in the game, despite having not played in well over a decade.
This was a refreshing break from the humdrum routine of adult life that most people find themselves in post-university, but I found myself wondering exactly what mistake or set of mistakes I had made to find myself living as a 34-year-old with a bunch of college kids. Looking back, I recognize now that I was gainfully employed and making a good wage, so I'm not sure what inertia kept me living there for as long as I did. I suspect I was still incubating after leaving life in SoCal. (And it wasn't all partying; one of the students was a really good cook, and I have fond memories with him of making pizza from scratch one afternoon while rocking out to ABBA.)
After this time, I had a brief stint of a few months of living in an apartment in Mountain View...about which, due to complete mediocrity, I need not say anything at all. I then relocated to what Bay Area locals call "the city", which is more broadly known as San Francisco, where I have been for the last year and half. I have only recently started to branch out into the city, exploring it on foot in a haphazard, serendipitous way. One day, while wandering through North Beach, I happened upon a random staircase that stretched far and away up into some trees. It looked like it might take me where the beanstalk took Jack in the old fairy tale. I ascended the steep staircase, quickly rising to some gorgeous panoramic views of the city, and ultimately ended up finding myself at Coit Tower, a destination I had been meaning to check out. (Someone recently clued me in to the fact that these were the Filbert Street Steps.)
Such is San Francisco. I think you could spend five years here, exploring the various nooks and crannies, and you probably wouldn't be able to find all of the hidden gems in that time. I have more than half a mind to do this, since I can't leave the house without finding some corner of the city I love. As jaded as I have become about the Bay Area tech scene, and despite the fact that this is what the city is most well-known for, I have recently found that there is a good deal more to the city than just tech, and much of it is worth taking the time to uncover.
I write all of this in reflection, to understand where I've been, and to get a more concrete sense of where I ought to go. The company I work for recently laid off a significant portion of its employees. (It feels a little odd to work for a company where that sort of thing counts as national news.) I came out of the process still having a job, and in the wake, the team I am on has been restructured to be one that offers some exciting prospects with opportunities to build cool new things. Despite this, I tendered my resignation with the company yesterday. I've found myself stagnated. The problems I'm solving, the code I'm writing, all of it resembles the code I wrote when I first started 3 and a half years ago. I've ceased learning new things as a matter of course and become comfortable. If that's not a sure sign that you're about to jump the shark as a tech professional, I can't think of a better one. It would be easy to stay and continue doing the work, but easy has always been a more terrifying prospect to me than that of the unknown.
Slightly more than this, I went on a first date with a girl last weekend (my first in a long while), and this resulted in some forced perspective. I found her to be an all-around lovely person, and while conversation seemed to flow along happily, there was a shift in her demeanor about an hour in, and shortly thereafter she recused herself from our date because she had to "return some library books". (For me, this was a new one, and it's rich enough that I'm going to steal it for politely ditching future first dates.) It's always impossible to know why you don't click with someone, because it more than likely has absolutely nothing to do with you, and even if it does, it would be silly to attempt to change yourself in accordance with anyone else's possible wishes. But, this encounter did make me self-reflective, and I realized something critically important: I have lost sight of myself. As a man, as a human being, as a potential force for good in the world, as someone who will stand for something, as a person who proactively eases the burden of his fellow humans, as a steward of the joy that this world offers to us and that we are responsible for sharing with others, as a visionary who will take responsiblity for making the world what he feels it ought to be. Whether or not I have ever truly had sight of myself is probably debatable, but I have found myself accepting that I must now do the hard work of bringing my own self into focus and following whatever trajectory that puts me on.
Among all else going on, my younger brother and his wife are expecting their first child in the next couple of days. In the span of the next week, I will become an uncle. The mere thought of this, and of meeting this little baby for the first time, actually brings me more happiness than I ever thought it would.
If I have one key shortcoming as a Bay Area tech dude, it is that I do what so many out-of-the-gate startup failures attempt to do: copy some successful version of the past, instead of taking a chance on doing anything altogether new. The past can serve as inspiration, it can offer instruction, but it can never function as a step-by-step guide. You have to live believing that the world is imbued with many worthwhile things that remain undiscovered, some unknown not only to you but also to all of humanity, and to enthusiastically dive into the search of uncovering them.