A New Hope
The last few months of 2020 seemed like a big haze. After leaving NetApp in August I spent some time just taking a break from everything. A month later my MBA program (evening) started and that kept me busy while I still tried to wrap my head around the big “what-to-do” question.
About the only thing I knew for sure was that I just couldn’t go back to Big Tech (or even Medium Tech). So, of course, I decided to launch my own startup.
Managed to find a decent office space (heavily, heavily discounted thanks to Covid) at the American Underground startup incubator. Then I dutifully registered my business as an LLC. One small problem — I didn’t know what I was building.
Maybe, more precisely, I knew exactly what to build but it just happened to change from week to week :) I would do so much research on various promising ideas but could never find enough motivation to stick with a single idea. Almost like a case of paralysis-by-analysis (the curse of a perfectionist!)
So after three months of this insanity and zero lines of code I accepted that this structure-less build the company and then find the idea strategy wasn’t working and something needed to change.
[Side note: I fully understand adults with families typically don’t have 3–4 months to screw around and “find their passion”. I was fortunate that my severance package from NetApp was pretty generous and enabled me to explore].
But like I said earlier, I didn’t want to go back to the kind of work as a senior-level software engineer in a silicon valley tech company. I am not going to deny the pay was good. Not to mention the free food, constant parties, onsite fitness facility, and other perks.
So what I did was put together a “Values and Interests” statement (hah, my MBA classes already rubbing off on me). I created a note in Evernote with a bulleted list for these two categories. Whenever I looked at job opportunities I would use this as criteria for whether I should pursue.
For “Values”, in the back of my mind I asked these kind of questions when creating my list: Who do I want to be? Where do I belong? Where do I*not* belong?
And for “Interests”, I was asking: What am I passionate about? What kind of work do I hate doing? What are my strengths?
I feel going into the job search process this helped me tremendously because it helped to filter the noise on job boards and also resist a lot of the half-baked pitches I’d get from random recruiters much more easily...
Nevertheless, finding work during a Covid-19 pandemic in late November/December is what I would have classified as a low probability event.
Here I wanted to share briefly what I did and what worked. I relied exclusively on two channels: LinkedIn Premium ($29/month, although they often run specials) and using 1-2 recruiters.
Based on prior experience, I knew LinkedIn Premium produced an abundance of leads of higher quality than some of the other recruiting sites like Dice.com, Indeed.com, etc. There was some overlap with these other job sites, but there were also some opportunities that were exclusive to LinkedIn. Having said that, of the 20–30 leads I followed, not a single one got me to a phone screen interview. Most did not even give me an acknowledgment they received my application and were not interested — mainly just a wall of silence.
I worked with 1–2 recruiters and got excellent results. Notice, I did not say “recruiting agencies”. Over the years after many tech conferences and meetup events I’d managed to forge some relationships with recruiters who actually knew me and knew where I’d fit best. I’d speak to some of these guys usually once or twice a day like were were trying to crack this problem together. Or like that movie Jerry McGuire where I was Cuba Gooding Jr and the recruiter was my agent played by Tom Cruise, lol.
In the end, I ended up at Broadvine (a small startup in the hospitality SAAS space), as their director of engineering and I couldn’t be happier. It’s the perfect balance of leadership and management while still having my hands dirty enough to get into the code if need be :)
Having a clear “Values and Interests” statement helped me enter the job searching process and not feel overwhelmed at the multitude of (mostly mediocre) options while enabling me to focus on just the three or four that really mattered most.
