When saving and strategizing to leave the workforce, it’s crucial to make a plan for what you are retiring to. That’s what I write about— my journey to financial independence and what I am doing now after turning in my notice. But I realized I haven’t shared much about what I’m retiring from. Most of my career happened in parallel with writing this blog, but I didn’t write much about it as it happened. I want to share the story of my career, and why the refrain “I could never retire, I love my job too much!” was something I never related to.
What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up
elementary
When adults started asking me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I told them first that I wanted to be a dolphin-trainer-slash-marine-biologist. I filled my journals with definitions of ‘ekolokayshun’ (I was six, so my spelling still needed a bit of work). Then, I asked my parents’ friend what she did and if she made more than $100. When I received confirmation that she did indeed make more than $100 as a lawyer, I started answering that I wanted to be a lawyer too. I liked the way my teacher raised her eyebrows, as if already impressed.
high school
By the time I started applying to college, I was no closer to knowing what I wanted to do with my life. In high school I took all the advanced placement (AP) classes I could, and skipped a couple grades in math. When I finished my calculus course early, I had the chance to either commute to a local community college or take AP Computer Science. I decided to go with computer science, where we all collectively floundered, much to our teacher’s chagrin. We would trade off asking him for help, and he would take over, his long fingers writing the code for us. I tried to decipher the massive Java book, feeling like an elderly person trying to keep up with the latest slang (what is “rizz” anyway?).
In all my other AP Classes, I scored 4s and 5s. But when it came to the Computer Science exam, I stared blankly at the prompt, wrote a basic function, and filled it in with a sonnet in iambic pentameter. I got the lowest score, an utter lack of surprise.
university
The next year I went off to college with my major undeclared. Around every corner, someone would ask me what I was majoring in. I must have been asked over three hundred times by family and strangers, the go-to get-to-know-you question on campus. I started answering with different majors every time, trying them on for size. Physics, yes, that feels like a cozy autumn jacket, useful in certain situations. When I say engineering, people say, “Wow, so you’re smart.” I like the way they take it for granted. It feels like a tailored-suit with a pop of color. Sociology? They look at me as if I’m wearing a strange hat. You do you, I guess, their eyes slide off me, bored already. Really, you paid how much, just for a hat?
Truth be told, I wanted to be an English major. A cozy wrap. I drafted poems and short stories and published funny articles in the school paper à la The Onion. But I could not faithfully answer the inevitable follow-up, “What are you going to do with an English degree?” Maybe I could solve it with a double major: Physics and English. A one-two punch of passion and practicality.
A counselor pointed out that neither major overlapped, so it may take more than four years. “Why don’t you try taking this career-matching quiz?” She tallied up my score.
- Human Resources
- Environmental Engineering
It said since I said I like helping and working with people, I should go into HR. That honestly did not appeal to me at all. Next up, I mentioned a desire to work outside, so it listed environmental engineering. It might shock some that after the AP Comp Sci fiasco coupled with my desire to work with people and go outside, that I would eventually become a software engineer. But I’m getting to that.
My First Internship: A Software Surprise!
I figured I could write on the side so I chose mechanical engineering, figuring I could still get an environmentally-oriented role but with a more flexible degree.
I fumbled with my phone at the bottom of a ski lift when I got the offer— my first real job! A biotech firm in Denver wanted me as a ‘Systems Engineering Intern’. I didn’t know exactly what that would entail, but I accepted with enthusiasm. The boss asked if I could extract the data from their support calls and turn it into meaningful information—which hospitals were calling the most about broken machines and what the most frequent complaints were.
I could use whatever language I liked, but I had to do it all on my own. There was no tired high school teacher to write it for me, no hard requirements, and no real deadline except the end of the summer. I learned about backend engineering to access the database, then figured out how to manipulate it into something significant. I taught myself Python, feeling at times like a genius and other times quite stumped. No one else on the team knew how to code, so I worked alone in my cubicle. I remember that I didn’t know how to separate code into different files, or even that I should, so it was one file with hundreds of lines of code. But by the end of the summer, we celebrated the completed project and displayed my dashboards on the TV monitors on the wall.
When I started applying to jobs in Portland, I typed in a search for ‘engineering’, and scrolled past the first few pages of software offerings. There were only a few different mechanical options, but hundreds of software jobs. I liked the work I had been doing all summer, so I decided to apply to an entry level role that listed Java and C+ as requirements. Though I ‘learned’ Java in high school, I knew I wasn’t likely to actually get the job, but I applied anyway.
One friend said, You won’t be able to do that without a degree. I said, Watch me.
At this point, I knew I could teach myself if I needed to. After a screening call and another run down by the hiring manager, I was invited in for an official interview. I flew into Portland, anxious about those live coding interviews I had read about. The team didn’t bother asking many technical questions though, “We work with a proprietary language anyway.” The language is called Pick, named after its creator, Dick Pick. (It still makes me giggle). They said they were just looking for someone who was interested in learning, and who could pick up skills quickly. I fit that requirement snugly.
My First ‘Real’ Job
I started at the same time as Jade, a recent graduate with a computer science degree. A few years older than me, he was always dressed in a button-up shirt and slacks. After the first week of initiation, our boss put us on a project with another recent-joiner. Jade would come to work, back ramrod straight, and pull up code he said he’d spent all night writing. Why? I wondered. Some days he greeted us with a smile and good morning, sometimes he would grunt and start wordlessly working at his desk. We were assigned an open-ended project: take an old hackathon and automate a solution. Management didn’t give us a due date, but their cavalier attitude did nothing to temper Jade’s sense of urgency.
The Note
At first we got along alright, but I started to notice that my questions irritated him. I didn’t want to hold us back, but my knowledge of this tech was patchy. It was all crumbled together from my experience in class with Matlab, what little I put together on Python, and now I clumsily navigated bash commands on the terminal. I made the mistake of asking a question about something basic. Maybe it was something like asking how to split the code into different files, that pesky thing I never figured out at that biotech firm.
Jade stopped talking to me, ignoring me for the rest of the day and not greeting me the next morning either. Given that our desks were right next to each other, this was quite the feat. At the end of the week, I found a folded piece of paper on my desk, just right of my coffee cup. Jade’s handwriting listed the ways I fell short as a software engineer, as if building a case against me. Asking elementary questions was at the top of the list. I realized that he had taken this list to his meeting with our boss. My heart beat faster, squeezing my throat. I felt like an imposter here, and now I had proof. I fought tears, but it was Friday, so I spent the entire weekend fretting.
The next week, my boss and I met for our one-on-one. Shockingly, he told me I was doing well. We talked about the project and how he was impressed by a bug fix I made after going on-site to meet clients. He closed the meeting by asking if there was anything else I wanted to talk about. Uh, yeah. I mentioned the list. I didn’t think Jade meant to leave on my desk, but he did. My boss sighed, “I wouldn’t worry about that. I told him, ‘do you think she’s stupid?’ No? Well I hired you for different reasons. You each have different talents.” The pessimistic part of me still wondered, is Jade right that I wasn’t cut out for this job, because I didn’t have the elementary knowledge I needed? I wanted to prove him wrong.
“Anything else?”
I asked about the deadline for our project. “Oh that,” he waved his hand. “It’s just a learning opportunity more than anything else. Other engineers have tried but just haven’t been able to fully automate a solution. You can take the quarter and see what you can do with it.” When I got back to my desk, I asked Jade when he thought the project was due. Jade had privately decided we had to get it done in a week. No wonder he was so worked up.
Elle’s Experience
There was only one other female software engineer at the company, Elle. We became friends, eating lunch together and getting roped into diversity efforts for the company. We taught workshops for middle school girls because, we were told, getting more women into engineering is all a ‘pipeline issue’. How convenient, to avoid introspection about what could be done to retain women in the workforce. As if the problem is as simple as ‘girls don’t know they can be engineers!’ as women leave the workforce in droves.
Women make up 57 percent of the overall workforce. Comparatively, women make up only 27 percent of the workforce in the technology industry. Of the 27 percent that join the technology industry, more than 50 percent are likely to quit before the age of 35, and 56 percent are likely to quit by midcareer.
SHRM
I had already beat so many odds to be here, taken the most grueling university courses, and made it into a highly competitive field. I didn’t want to be another statistic. Later, I confided in Elle about my clash with Jade. She told me she had a totally different experience. Her teammates were all dads with daughters around her age. They took her under their wings and patiently walked her through the most basic problems. She felt like they had her back.
The Training
One day, at lunch we laughed about the sexual harassment training we were required to take. Which of the following is not okay to say to a coworker?
a. Nice haircut!
b. Are you feeling better today?
c. Wow, I like the way that dress hangs off your body.
Hedgehog Guy approached me after the training, “Apparently what I was doing could be considered harassment, so I’m sorry if it was.” He had made a comment about my legs the day I wore a dress to work. I guess it’s not a useless training after all. I call him Hedgehog Guy to keep him anonymous, but there were so many Marks at the company he is essentially anonymous anyway.
A couple months in, I woke up one morning realizing the missing piece of our automation project, and showed up at work fired up to finish it. On the way to my desk, I ran into a senior engineer, and I told him what I planned on doing. Twenty minutes later, he sent a message to our team with the code for the missing piece. I grappled with the disappointment of not being the one to complete the puzzle, but also pleased with the outcome. My boss called me into his office and slid a sheet of paper across the desk. I got a promotion! Jade got a promotion too, but I kept mine under wraps in case it frustrated him. I managed to switch to a new team, so I said goodbye to Jade and Hedgehog Guy.
Onto Bigger Things: My Second Job
After a few months on the new team, the CTO called me into his office. He wanted to send a group of hand-picked engineers to the UK on high profile projects. I spent 6 months in the UK, learning a new coding language and trying to solve yet another problem that engineers with way more experience had given up on. By the end, we presented our findings to the CEO with sweaty-palms, and the director offered me a job at the UK office. However, I had a partner waiting for me back in Portland, and our plan was to move soon for his job, so I decided to try to get a job where I could work remotely.
One of my friends told me that he had just accepted an offer at a huge company, for double our previous salary. That sounded pretty good to me, so I applied. And I got it! A role as a Software Engineer III with a hefty salary, the ability to work remotely, and free beer on tap. The only catch was that I would be on a team of two, just me and a super senior engineer.
Project Whack-a-mole
He worked remotely, so we spent most of our days on calls, pair programming. More accurately, he would chatter while writing code at ten times the pace I could ever hope to cobble something together. I did my best to tackle the parts he didn’t feel like doing, but hated feeling like the one on a school project barely contributing. My friends would remind me that the guy had twenty years of experience on me, so it was expected that he would be faster. Still, I worried he’d be resentful. What would it take for him to approach our manager with a list of my deficiencies? Jade #2.
The feedback I got from my manager was: ‘be more technical.’ I tried. I contributed to open-source projects, I started a technical book club, I poured hours into code. At that company, engineers were often moved around, manager to manager. We were cogs, resources to plug-and-play for whatever project needed them. I had a total of six different bosses by the time I decided to leave. Each project meant a new code base to learn.
On one hand, all this moving around meant I was getting exposure and learning a lot. However, my already-patchy knowledge felt like it was only getting patchier. I never knew which question would reveal that I lacked a true foundation. The constant movement also stalled my career advancement, repeatedly promised a promotion in 6 months, but by the time 6 months rolled around I already had a new manager who simply made new assurances. I started my career with a couple of peers and watched them get promoted through I, II, III, Senior, and now Principal engineers.
I was advised by one manager to stop running our book club. Apparently it made me look ‘less technical’ even though we were marching through Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture and Designing Data-Intensive Applications (affiliate links). He also said I should halt my efforts at helping with diversity efforts at the company, because— you guessed it— not technical.
Going Abroad – Jaded Again!
After another cycle of promotion disappointment, I wondered wistfully if the salary was worth the run-around.
Meanwhile, my friend Elle had moved to the Netherlands, where she is now a dev manager of nine. She urged me to consider moving, and after a big life event, I decided to move to Amsterdam. Excited to have Elle there to help me transition, I started applying for international roles and landed a job at a start-up.
At first, the work was refreshing. I knew how to code in the language they were using. I didn’t feel like a burden. I worked autonomously from my home office, going in every so often to see my team. My boss let me mentor and pseudo-manage a junior engineer for practice. By now I was not surprised to be one of only three female engineers on staff, but at least now there was diversity in nationality, from Turkey to India to Bulgaria to Ukraine to Sweden.
Yet even here, I realized one of my teammates was a Jade clone. Jade #3. It seemed no matter where I turned there would be an over-functioning engineer frustrated by other, unwieldy engineers daring to dabble in their databases. To earn their respect, you had to be better, and I admit I was far from better. I tried not to take it personally. In fact, this type of person is so prevalent, there’s a name for them in the industry: Brilliant Jerks (that’s the nice name, there’s also one that starts with A and ends with holes).
I’m Rubber You’re Glue, So I Won’t Promote You!
I have always been frustrated when people discount their own abilities by saying they are ‘bad at math‘ or ‘just don’t have the brain for it’. But I have to say, as hard as I tried, I simply could not keep up with the Jades of the software world. I attempted to rely on what my first boss said: we all have different talents. I asked my manager in Amsterdam to write a recommendation for me on LinkedIn. It’s in my pending folder and says:
“Some teams have rockstars others have geniuses. Some are fast to deliver and others focus on quality.
But the best teams I’ve worked with have always had someone like Mechanic who’s the glue that brings it all together.“
I can’t help but be embarrassed by this, he meant it well but to me it was a backhanded compliment. I read it as: “Mechanic is not a genius, nor is she fast, nor does she deliver quality work.” Yeesh. For someone who is used to excelling, striving, and achieving, being reduced to glue made me feel stuck. Hiring managers are not looking for glue; they are looking for rockstars. I needed to be the one to write the code for the missing pieces of coding challenges, not directing other peoples’ strengths. There simply isn’t room for whatever type of engineer I am (not a Brilliant Jerk, but not a Kind Dolt either. A Middleware* Mastermind perhaps).
*Middleware is a type of computer software programme that provides services to software applications beyond those available from the operating system. It can be described as “software glue”
Wikipedia
You have to love this work to do it
“You have to love this work to do it,” one of my coworkers would recite. Privately, I disagreed. I had been doing it for nearly a decade. To do the work, you just had to do it. Day in, day out, open the code editor, run into errors, tangled webs of code, and slowly untangle, decode, flush with adrenaline of solving it, only to dive into despair when a problem morphed into something uglier. You had to weather that rollercoaster, be okay feeling like a newbie, and ask questions (but not to a Brilliant Jerk). I don’t think joy in work is inherent; it is cultivated.
I think I could have loved it, but I got tired of feeling like an amateur, looking over my shoulder for Jade #4, staring at a screen all day. I had invested in this career hoping to prove people wrong: that I could do this. And I can. But why? Why does it matter? Was this all about ego, about the teacher’s eyebrow raise, people commenting on my braininess, wanting to prove that friend wrong, the one who said I couldn’t do it? Maybe I wanted to take the failure, that 1 on an exam, and turn it into a success story. I didn’t want to be a statistic, I would beat the odds. I wanted to do it for the women who are coming down the pipeline. I like life on ‘Hard Mode’, but maybe I was trying to go too far, too fast. I was in over my head, thrust into the fire, drinking from the firehose, but I want a minute to breathe.
Maybe I would change my coworkers recitation: “You have to work to love this.”
And I don’t want to work anymore. I’m sure there’s a place out there I could enjoy work. There’s a spot where I could develop mastery, in an environment where I could fail without fear, with patient peers, and meaningful work. In some ways I did succeed. I learned so much. I made enough money to retire before 30 to support the lifestyle of a wanna-be English major. I have the confidence of someone who looked a new problem in the face every day and figured out solutions. But this is the career I’m exiting. Instead, for now, I’m on the pursuit of joy, mastery, and meaning. Bye Jade, you brilliant jerk.
What About You?
Did you leave a toxic career?
Have you ever worked with a ‘Jade’?
What makes you love or hate your job?
Let me know in the comments below!
Thanks for writing this. As a ChemE major who graduated and worked as an engineer on oil rigs, the feelings of being a woman in a male dominated field are hard to put into words, even 5 years after leaving. I experienced similar things, both overt and subtle sexism, feeling like an outsider as my coworkers instantly bonded over the fact that they were white males, and some looking over my shoulder since I didn’t have the security of “being in the club” when it was time for layoffs. Now on my 5th year of nursing, I wonder what it would have been like if I could have found supportive environments in engineering. Maybe I wouldn’t have had to upend my whole life, go back to school, and work through a pandemic?
Anyway, it was infuriating to read about your boss telling you to be more technical and reeks of sexism. I’m sorry your manager called you glue and wrote off your intelligence. And the part about some guy swooping in at the last minute to “solve” the puzzle hit home a bit too hard. Hope your pursuit of joy and mastery is going well and hope you keep writing about it.
Wow, your career adventure sounds so interesting, I’m impressed you went back to school and switched from chemical engineer to nursing. What a pivot! Thanks for writing in and sharing your experience, and validating mine. There’s so much that didn’t even make it into this write up, you’re right, it’s hard to to put it into words.
“[T]he refrain ‘I could never retire, I love my job too much!’ was something I never related to.”
Amen.
I’m so incredibly grateful to have discovered FIRE. It flipped so much that I took as conventional wisdom on its head including that a be all and end all is a (high-paying), even if rather unsatisfying, job and working in it or similar positions to 65. Turns out you can have your cake and eat it, too. And that cake tastes awfully good.
Heck yeah it does!
Thanks for this insight in your career path and sorry that it has not all been good. Some stunning examples of male macho culture. However, I just wanted to comment on ‘the glue’ remark. In what way is that different from your first boss’ remark: “Well I hired you for different reasons. You each have different talents.”?
I think this is spot on. I run a couple of teams (not in tech) in which I need a mix of people. Some of them will excel in technical skills, but the ones I value most are the ones that (also) have the ‘people skills’. It is essential for the group to function. And the fact that you can’t relate to some of the Brilliant Jerk’s behaviour is a demonstration that you master the people skill and in my opnion are a better added value for any team, if not a better human being for it. Just my thoughts.
The difference is context. The first was in private, helping mentor me. The second was after ~8 years of experience, autonomously delivering features and mentoring junior engineers and as a public recommendation on my LinkedIn profile (I edited the piece to make that more clear). It also makes a difference that certain skills are valued more highly in the tech industry. Whether or not it’s right, Brilliant Jerks got promotions and into leadership, while ‘glue’ people find it hard to make a space for themselves. It’s amazing if they get mentorship from people like my first boss or like you, who can recognize the value of those skills and attach promotions and salary increases to match the results of those skills. But in my experience, those skills are not highly valued in tech.
I’ve been following you for some time now but didn’t know the ins and outs of your experiences at work – no wonder you were keen to achieve FIRE!
Personally, I think degrees are all well and good – they provide good grounding, but what you learn on the job is often what is most useful. For what it’s worth, you write well and perhaps being an author could be something you might enjoy exploring.
(Also, I only found out a couple of days ago that “rizz” means charisma! I kept seeing it on Bluesky and had no idea what was meant.)
I didn’t occur to me at first that I hadn’t shared much about my work on here! You’re right, learning on the job is the biggest factor in professional development for sure. Apparently ‘rizz’ just got added to the dictionary, so my joke probably won’t hold up much longer 🙂
Loved this! Well, not the sentiment, but it was interesting to hear all the details. I’ve known a few Jades in my time but as a white man I never had to deal with most of the crap you have had to. … Wow, that’s a crappy linkedin rec. 🙁
Right?! The Jades are the absolute worst, but I did want to acknowledge some of the good. Elle and I are thankful to the men who mentored us in the beginning with patience and compassion 🙂
Wow! That was a ride!
Phew…I’ve many thoughts…
I think you’re too hard on yourself. You’ve done amazingly well. I’ve met you and know you well enough to know you are indeed very sharp. If there’s anything you’re doing wrong here, it’s just comparison. It’s like keeping up with the Joneses…
But instead…
It’s keeping up with the Jades.
You kept “leveling up” throughout your career, finding further success, and running into more folks who have also found a lot of success. You worked from what you said was perhaps a shaky foundation and patched it up as well as you could. Even with that handicap, you continued to succeed!
If your measurement of success and self-satisfaction comes from comparison to other engineers/developers at each successive “leveling up” and a need to be one of the best on the team — you’re setting yourself up for failure.
There’s always someone “better”.
Success in the business world, especially in tech, means you keep raising yourself up to work with more talented or studied individuals. You’re going to meet your match and find the extent of your capabilities at some point. You can’t redefine yourself as “average” (or in this case, “just glue”) because you’re simply surrounded by lots of talented individuals in a more competitive environment.
Look at where you started! All those years ago, cobbling together a bunch of function calls from a single script file a million lines long. No OOP, no concept of MVC, nothing. Today’s you would run circles around your old self. And you’re still very young!
Your personal growth and satisfaction you found in those moments when you finally put something altogether, pressed compile—and lo and behold—it worked!—that’s the moment that matters.
…
And glue! You know who are great technical gluers? CTOs, freelancers, agency founders, and so on.
I can’t speak to the gender part of the problem—and I know it is an issue—but those Jades are a real issue I haven’t known anyone that goes into tech to not face. There’s a personality that tends to gravitate to tech and while they can be genius from a very technical perspective, their people skills often are left to wither on the vine.
Don’t take it all too much to heart! And believe me, that’s not my attempt to convince you to keep at it. This FIRE life is a wonderful place to be; there’s a lot more to life that tackling the next Jira bug.
I really enjoyed reading your full story here and there was plenty of parts I wasn’t familiar with. I’m excited to see what you do next, Mechanic. 🙂
You’re right, there will always be someone else to compare yourself to. I agree with you about working with more talented and studied individuals, I was always coached to try to be the ‘least smart’ person in the room. However this does end up setting yourself up to always feel like a little fish.
I know my ‘glue skills’ are valuable in other contexts (and even in tech contexts, even if it wasn’t appreciated as much there!) and hope to transfer them to something meaningful! Thanks for your perspective as a fellow software engineer. If I go back, I’ll try to find a pond where I can thrive 🙂
Very interesting post. I give you a lot of credit. I tried programming in college but ran out of money and never went back. I’ve been in a lot of toxic environments. I retired in March (best decision ever) because the place I had been at became really toxic in about a year. Small family owned company filled with drama and plenty of backstabbing, not to mention an idiot son that got moved around from one department to another. I spent my whole adult working life trying to find a job/career I loved to no avail. So glad that is behind me now.
Very glad you’ve had a good experience retiring and gotten out of a toxic environment. We often don’t realize how bad it was until we get to see it in hindsight!
This was such an interesting post!! I really appreciated learning the ins and outs of your journey. I’m in a very different field (and one dominated by female-identified persons) but I could still relate to the impact of colleagues and coworkers. It’s amazing how much it can affect workplace satisfaction. IMakes me more committed to being one of those who mentors and acknowledges strengths (while I am still working).
Yes, the folks who can mentor and encourage are invaluable. It’s always interesting learning about the pitfalls in different fields of work!
I’ve been looking a while to find a woman FIRE blog that was less about the numbers and more about everything else. Thank you for providing this and I hope you continue to find joy down your path of writing and adventure! I appreciate your insights and down to earth-ness(?😂) and thank you for all the food pics!! Motivating me to keep saving for sure, as like you, I try to keep my eye on the “what I’m moving towards,” instead of away from, on the FI path. All the best. Thank you!!
Thanks for your comment Lauren! I’m glad someone appreciates the food pics 🙂
I have been a long time reader, but this is my first time commenting. I have always resonated with your blog because I have been working as a software engineer for about the same amount of time as you and also have the same aspirations to achieve financial independence, which were also primarily shaped by my experiences at work.
In this post, you were able to articulate the doubts and challenges I’ve also been grappling with as a woman in the industry. There’s always the perpetual sense of being the outsider with the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) comments that make you feel like you don’t belong, especially when it comes to technical skill despite your experience and body of work speaking for itself. Part of this was also due to a similar reason as yours with having learned coding later in life and my not having a natural affinity to it, with learning it having been an uphill challenge. This leads to a constant hum of imposter syndrome and feeling the heavy weight of having to always “prove yourself” and defy the “women can’t do engineering” stereotype over and over again. To compensate for all that, I’ve been pushing myself to work longer hours, basically becoming a workaholic with not much else going on outside of work, which has caused me to feel even more isolated. The constant push to be always growing and progressing also don’t help as well, making the ground feel like it’s shifting constantly and that work is neverending.
A lot of this has caused me to discount my strengths, which may be more “soft skill” related such as my ability to collaborate with anyone and understanding how manage stakeholders on projects to lead and deliver projects / features. However, I’ve noticed that these same qualities in male coworkers being lauded or even used to offset a lack of technical ability because of the much easier camaraderie between a mostly male team and manager. They can ask the basic, “elementary” questions without being deemed incompetent and sometimes even straight up give wrong answers without being dinged.
All of this has made me question my career path too and whether it was simply my contrarian nature to prove others wrong also, but I think it’s also taught me a lot more about myself too. There are detractors and brilliant jerks along the way, but also there are people that want to support you and help you grow. There’s also the joy when you figure out an especially tricky bug or when you get into the flow state of building a feature or when you collaborate with a teammate to integrate a feature. It’s also taught me to advocate for myself more with negotiating an offer to asking for a promotion. It’s a long steep climb ahead, but if I look back for a moment, I can also see how far up I’ve come and how I never thought I would be able to make it up this far. There were many times I’ve contemplated quitting or giving up.
It’s also made me reframe the problem from “Should I quit?” into “Do I really need to keep progressing / leveling up all the time?”. I’ve realized it’s okay to let go of the pressure of needing to keep up with everyone else all the time. I’ve worked hard and I’ve come far. Yes there are people further ahead, but there are also people further behind (including me a few year ago). Sure, maybe I’m not going to be a Principal Engineer, but I also have started cultivating my hobbies, working out, and also trying to build a community outside of work which have been much more fulfilling. Just like our savings and investing, these need investing + effort and time to compound and I’m hoping to reap the rewards of these later in the future. Until I’m also financially free like you, I’m going to try and keep all this in mind. I hope you write more about this in the future and thank you for sharing your story!
Hi Sunny, thank you for taking the time to leave a comment for the first time! I always appreciate when people write in. It’s clear you have done some processing and thinking about the balance in your career. I love that you can take the time to pause and see how far you’ve come. Letting go of the pressure of needing to keep up is one of the keys, I think. I didn’t write in my post, but I tried to do this, but found myself always teetering—never quite able to let go of wanting to progress. If I could have let go of that, I think I could have been happier. That’s a skill in itself! I would go months thinking I was happy where I was, in level and salary, but then would question it all. Like you say, cultivating hobbies, working out, and building a community are amazing ways to find fulfillment outside of work and productivity. I really think it sounds like you’re on the right track.
thanks for info.