Thank you, faster and faster
I’m writing today’s note on a flight to San Francisco, where I’ll spend the next three weeks onboarding at Stripe as an engineer on the Sigma team.
I am tremendously excited.
This is my first time writing about the new job (granted, that’s omitting the myriad “omg omg omg” texts to friends and family) and it feels kind of weird to do so!
I think my hesitation is both that the some personal news brand of Medium post has grown helplessly cliché and that there’s a severe lack of novelty in my situation in particular:
- I’m the platonic ideal of a developer. I don’t mean that in a self-aggrandizing sense: I mean that I’m a 25-year old white guy who knows a lot of buzzwords and spends his spare time programming. The only systemic incentive I don’t benefit from is that I like wearing cardigans more than hoodies.
- There was no hero’s journey. I decided to start job-hunting; I applied to a couple different companies; I got offers from them; I accepted the one I felt best about.
- I interview well — part of this goes back to the aforementioned systemic advantages (it’s easy to interview well when you look like what people think a software developer looks like) but it also helps that I spent two years at Amazon conducting interviews and was able to internalize a lot of positive techniques that other developers might not have. (Also, as an aside: if you are a software developer who wants interview practice I am more than happy to conduct a mock interview with you.)
So, yeah! I’m very excited but have been a little reticent to talk about having a great new job at a great company. It veers too close to braggadocio.
Still, in the spirit of semi-boastful exuberance (this is my newsletter, after all) here are some things about Stripe:
- Stripe is a company I have loved since I ran
pip install stripesix or so years ago. - Stripe was the best and most reasonable software interview experience I have ever had. (I’m not just saying that because of the outcome.)
- Stripe has an impressive commitment to fighting climate change and as of last year they are carbon-neutral.
I will also say some other random things:
- The last week of funemployment has taught me that I probably have too deeply internalized a Puritan work ethic. To quote Max Read: You don’t realize how much of your sense of self is bound up in how you use your time until you have a lot of it.
- Leaving a job is deeply, deeply terrifying!
- But starting a job is deeply, deeply exciting.
- I listened to an Ada Limon lecture yesterday (thanks, Melanie!) and she ended with this poem that is so lovely and featured a final stanza whose words have been stuck in my throat all day:
with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is
Okay. I’ve been writing this with more than the requisite level of ramshackle verve and it is time to cut myself off and finish If on a winter’s night a traveler, but here is one last thing: I am so extremely lucky in that every job I’ve had has been the best job I’ve ever had. I hope (and trust) the trend continues.
P.S. if you’re in San Francisco, I would love to grab a cocktail or a cortado or a croissant. (They have cortados here, right? Please tell me they have cortados here.)