Becoming

I am not sure what I became. I have a handful of dear friends (James, Nate, Aaron) who became serious engineers. They are excellent picks for Engineer #1 at your startup and have operated at Staff, Principal, etc level before and after the IPO of companies you're familiar with. I have my little bits of notoriety, for my NES emulation work in particular, but for the novelty of doing it in Lisp rather than pushing the state of the art.

I am a people person. I had the most fun as a Lead Instructor, or whatever it is called now if immersive programming bootcamps still exist. I was recently promoted to Senior Engineering Manager. I care about my team and the quality of our codebase. But I have often shied away from ownership of the hardest engineering problems. I am careful not to own too much then I discredit myself for not reaching higher.

I've felt a lot of tension and frustration lately with how I see myself. I'm trying to figure out how much of that is that I'm becoming less technical. It isn't that I'm consciously choosing to be non-technical, it's more that I am finding it harder and harder to make space for it. Maybe I fantasized that as a manager, I would do more hobby hacking. Maybe when I was early in it, I did.

As often happens when I'm trying to understand my feelings about my career, I found myself watching segments of the later seasons of Halt and Catch Fire. And re-reading old essays or talks I've given, things with titles like "angry in tech" or "lonely in tech". When I think back on what I miss, it is mostly people but sometimes a space and sense of daring. The Iron Yard will always feel like my most treasured adventure when not knowing enough some brave young people rented a rickety old building with a threatening elevator and showed up bright and early with nothing but smiles and bravery to build the future.

I don't know if I need to be a programmer. You won't be able to pry computers and code out of my hands until I'm dead and cold but it's hard to say how much of that is because my relationship with computers was the most stable part of my youth. When I was sent to boarding military school in Missouri as an 11 or 12 year old, my computer was the one thing I got to bring with me that held promise of comfort or home. I couldn't call my parents on the phone for 6 weeks. I had a knife held to my throat by a demented sergeant. I broke my arm. I was an alien.

What do I really want? I want to read and write, sometimes code. I want to talk about what I'm reading and writing with interesting people, that are trying to find the art in it all themselves. And a rickety office, where we try to forge a path a little bit beyond what is safe.