Day Three

Another three and a half years have flown by since I last wrote one of these posts.

I recently left my position as a Staff Platform Engineer1 and as of tomorrow, I'll be starting as a Lead Platform Engineer at Halter.

Ironically, the title is a bit of a misnomer in that a) I won't literally have any reports so I'm not directly leading anyone and b) I'll be the first Platform Engineer so by the other definition of lead, well, I'll be both the most junior and the most senior all at the same time.

While I can't say I read these posts myself, they tend to be pretty helpful at times for those who are starting out in their careers since they act as proof that despite fancy titles, I am in fact a normal person. In fact, perhaps I am sometimes more anxious than most would care to admit but I think there's a lot of value in exposing it for others.

With that, making this transition has been both the easiest and hardest of them all so far. In a direct sense, I was approached for the role which was flattering and apparently largely based on good word of mouth for some previous colleagues. Great stuff! I always hope that whatever I contribute can speak for itself and I suppose it has in this case.

With that said, I spend a chunk of time metaphorically looking around wondering when I'd be fed into the wood chipper. I'd be one of the first to say that doing arbitrary coding tests proves very little, especially when most of the problems you'll face will be somewhat unknowable in advance. I'd also be one of the first to say that having relatively little friction entering a new role after having a bunch of it historically feels weird. Mostly I'm going to mark it down as a fluke but I guess it's also partly the nature of startups too. There's a lot more stock in connections and word of mouth.

Speaking of, it's bizarre to me that this will be the first private company that I've officially worked for as a salaried employee2. I like to think I experienced some of it at Xero, who were post-IPO yet mid-ZIRP, so it'll be interesting to see how much of a culture shock it might be.

As far as my feelings about the role, I'm mostly just trying not to think about it and adopting an observational approach. As with any good startup, there's healthy skepticism that those joining from "older" businesses might try to implement more rigid processes and I'm definitely a proponent of being careful with that sort of stuff. In Seeing Like a State fashion, I imagine it's easy to try and apply a level of order only to accidentally strangle the very thing you're trying to improve.

In my mind, there's also a time travel component too, where you can be tempted to think "Ah, I've seen this pattern", you import a solution that will address some problems that will arise years down the track only for none of it to stick because a) you're too early for the value to be understood and b) the problem quite literally does not exist yet you've imported all of the overhead.

There's probably books and business-y lingo for all this but I couldn't really tell you. It's basically just all driven by vibes as the kids would say. I suppose it's also probably a symptom of the idea that experts3 can't tell you the rules because they've transitioned from pattern matching to it all just being automatic.

Anyway, we're getting a little off track here. The primary goal of these things is to capture how I felt in the moment because I definitely will not remember as I continue in my career, let along a week from now.

When I initially resigned, I had basically just wrapped up my last major project so a lot of it was knowledge handover as well as smaller quality of life contributions. I don't really know that I enjoyed that period like a younger me might've said "Great, you can just do whatever!" but it really isn't that much fun when you're essentially in limbo. I did write up some knowledge but prior to my resignation, I had a few larger pieces that I wanted to write up but when I got around to it, I didn't have as much motivation (due to knowing that I'd be gone shortly) as well as the scope of it kept snowballing in my head to a point of essentially being paralysed.

I should take a quick detour here to say that as I've continued in my career, the idea of taste has continued to be something that I've gone on about, but it also is somewhat double edged. In the case of this big brain dump I wanted to write up, what I should have done is churned out a bunch of small, scrappy rough drafts and put taste aside. Rather, I didn't and what I wanted to do in my head could never match my attention span and motivation in reality. I don't know that I'd necessarily call it procrastination but I guess it's like a sister concept where you need to be less ambitious to be motivated, rather than purely finding it uninteresting. I guess procrastination can really just apply to anything, not just boring stuff.

It was also during this resignation period that I seemingly injured my hand as well. At first, I thought I had gotten RSI or something. I had also been playing a bit of Gitadora GALAXY WAVE at the arcade as well, and I'm sure rapid drumming without warmups or stretches is probably asking for trouble. I can't say that I've really had any hand or arm issues in the past so this was definitely terrifying to me. I didn't even really want to do a lot of typing out of fear that I would be making things worse for myself too.

In fact, for a lot of the resignation period, I was actually quite frightened that not only would I get progressively worse, but I would get to the point where I wouldn't be able to actually carry out my new job. Primarily my right arm would get quite easily fatigued, and even sore at times which mostly drove my fear. Funnily enough, it was around this time that Debug Your Pain was trending on Hacker News and I found this page particularly reassuring4. I do think that having a bit of a realisation that pain is no guarantee of worsening damage is a good mental model to adopt. I think it was also news to me that the parts of the brain that process pain, also process anxiety which would suggest that quite literally getting anxious about pain can make your perceptions of pain even worse.

Anyway, I happen to be writing this all in one sitting as I always have so I seem to be mostly over it thankfully. I still get a few issues here and there but it hasn't been anywhere near long enough for the expected recovery period. On some level, I do wonder whether my resigning and ruminating on the bounds of my new role contributed to it but I guess we'll never really know.

For the role itself, I'm actually pretty excited as I write this. I had a week off prior to starting which I definitely think helped with both my physical recovery as well as just mentally decompressing.

Prior to all that though, I was quite comfortable through the interview process through to signing the contract but after that period, where I had nothing much but time to think, I definitely started to get a bit stressed out. In reality, I think it's just a sign of how seriously I take this sort of stuff. Obviously everyone wants to do a good job but I can't help but also worry about whether I can live up to the standards I've set for myself.

By definition, my exact role will be a little handwavy given the nature of wearing many hats in a startup. One of those hats is, and always has been in previous roles, to be a good representative of my team. In more concrete terms, this has meant going out of my way to do a bit of internal marketing of projects, specifically how they make life easier for internal users. It also means a lot of saying "We" to spread praise on the team, even if I personally have contributed something. For this particular role, it's a bit new that I'll be the initial point of contact which in my mind, means having direct relationships with users and likely having to go out of my way to forge them. I am still essentially an introvert so while I've done my fair share of this stuff in snippets, I genuinely don't know how I'll handle it on a larger scale.

Perhaps that brings me to the most important part of how I feel about all this: It scares me in a good way! Well, as I said, it kind of excites me now but on some level, there's that sense of "Ahh, what if I arrive and I'm way out of my depth" which is pretty silly given I was a) hired, b) approached and c) received good recommendations from past colleagues.

Having grappled with some of this between when I resigned and now, it may be more accurate to label it as more of a Reverse Dunning-Kruger where I'm not really worried about not knowing stuff. It's more the case that feel stupidly aware of all the stuff I know I don't know. Perhaps it's reasonable to feel this way compared to someone whose environment mostly consists of unknown unknowns. Ignorance is bliss and all that.

I do wonder if it's part of being a Platform/Site Reliability Engineer too. It's basically a constant whirlwind tour of everything that exists and often you end up getting into the minute details so it's like a perpetual imposter syndrome generation machine.

Maybe I would be more at peace just becoming a vibe coder who doesn't have to maintain anything.

Footnotes

  1. I started as a Senior Site Reliability Engineer and in that time, I got both a promotion and a title change to reflect some team reshaping. ↩

  2. I did briefly do a stint contracting for a short-lived startup. They happened to be participating in a startup accelerator and it was the same cohort of the startup accelerator that Sharesies came out of. I feel old writing that, and I'm not even that old! ↩

  3. I dunno if I'm one. I mean, if I'm the only Platform Engineer at the time of writing then by definition, I am the Subject Matter Expert so I guess I would be. ↩

  4. I should note that I had been to a physiotherapist who wasn't overly concerned after doing some tests, and he gave me some exercises to do. You should rule out any truly physical issues first when looking into this kind of stuff. ↩