2011

Although I graduated college with a CS degree, I was too fresh faced and I knew it. I had no internship experience and no understanding of what was expected of me for my first job. I applied pretty much anywhere for vaguely defined roles that required ‘5 years in Java’ knowing full well I wasn’t qualified for any of them. I clearly remember creating and submitting a CV directly to the recruiting company that was displaying a job listing from their client. How embarassing.

Wanting to stick around in the Irvine area, I applied to local hot companies that seem to suck talent directly through the UCI engineering straw. I applied to Google, Blizzard, Amazon. No responses. I applied to local contract shops. Some bites. I bumble through the interview. And these weren’t even very technical. They were effectively vibe checks that I catastrophically fumbled. These series of failures was a huge blow to my confidence, of which I already had very little of.

In my spare time I learned how to make websites. People shit on W3Schools but this free resource arguably was more impactful on my career than my university education was.

I interviewed and got an offer to join Experian Consumer Direct as a web developer. Ironically, this role didn’t really need any of the knowledge I gained in the UCI CS program as it was mostly centered around converting mockups in .psds and putting them down as HTML and CSS, something I got very good at. Daily tasks were making minor tweaks to verbiage or colors or images, or placing a tracking pixel on marketing materials or emails to feed their finely tuned AB testing machine. I envied the backend team for what I thought was handling real programming. I would open the .Net code base, only to peer into an undecipherable mess of connectors. I enjoyed writing front-end code, but I wanted to do more. I wanted to be better. I wanted to move up. I left after three years.

2014

I should have left much sooner. I blame popular boomer advice at the time to stick around a company for three years. I had nothing lined up but I set my sights on Silicon Valley. I took six months to get my ass ready, work on personal projects, buy my first domain, start my blog. You can take a look at a good amount of them on this blog itself/

Built my first web app on Java and Spring, a Slashdot clone that was running on my off the shelf desktop HP Pentium setup with a static ip. I’d leave the computer running 24/7 inspecting traffic mainly from Russia and India. In hindsight, I really shouldn’t have exposed my computer to the greater net, pretty sure I was host to a bacterial farm of trojans and viruses.

Started interviewing and despite the deliberate practice it was still tough. Rejections left and right. Once again taking massive hits to my confidence.

Alation eventually dropped into my interview queue. I never heard of them, something to do with data. I interviewed with resignation. I passed the phone interview. They flew me out. I ‘passed’ the onsite. They flew me out for a week trial. They liked my vibes and gave me an offer at the end of the week. They really needed a front-end developer and I guess I fit that bill somewhat perfectly; a guy that can make a site look pretty and has something to prove. Despite being a startup, the offer was double my previous salary, and despite being hungry, there was a buffet of knowledge to consume that I could ever chew off. I joined my first startup, a series A company as employee #13.

2015

The most striking thing as an outsider coming into working at a Silicon Valley company is the calibur of people you’re surrounded with. No shade on my previous coworkers at Experian, I pretty much had immediate incredible admiration for all of my peers at Alation. Each person brought a unique exceptional self and skills to the team. They were mostly all young or new to the engineering field but some how they’ve already gained all this understanding of how to develop ‘robust’ code. Not only that but they were exceptionally skilled at picking up new things.

I started as a front-end developer but as expected of a startup, you kind of just sign up to do anything.

2017

One of the worst roles I had was ‘scapegoat’. We had a fairly large client that used our product who was unhappy with the performance of our cloud querying service, so much so that they wanted to have an in person meeting with the engineering team that manages it, namely me.

To this day, I still am not sure what they were hoping to accomplish with that meeting. I truly do think it was a venting session for the client team and I just had to be the messenger and receiver of all their frustration and curiosity as to why there were so many outages. For the record, I found the issue in a Java connector dependency which was resolved with a version upgrade where the bug was fixed. Unfortunately by this time it was too late.

2020 Onward

The years went on and during that time, just generally learned how to conduct myself. Naturally ended up being lead on most projects from here onward managing execution and expectations for all stakeholders. I think I found out I was pretty good at it, but I know I could be better. I realized communications are ephemeral. Even things that are written down can be lost. The best thing to do here is to internalize and harden the plan yourself such that you can defend and repeat as needed for the team.

2023

I realized the company no longer needed me, maybe it even forgot I existed. I was coasting a bit on my tenure but I don’t think I was able to effectively execute against the main problem around data organization. My last problem I worked on broke me a little bit as the problem was clear, but the path we wanted to take way not. It was hard for the team to pick a direction and approach that balances technical implementation as well as product fit. I thought to take the lead by being more assertive in pushing what I saw as the best outcome but this led to more resistance and the ideas were shot down over many meetings. After multiple performance reviews of getting the highest marks of ‘exceeds expectation’ but not getting the recognition in compensation or title, I decided to move on.

I still have a lot of growth ahead of me.