In January, my entire team was laid off at NZXT. I had the option to stay longer, but I chose to take a package. Thanks to 5+ weeks of banked PTO and 6+ years of service, I was fortunate to have time to figure out my next steps. I know this kind of time is a luxury, so I tried to make the most of it.
I had already decided to move from engineering management back into an individual contributor role, but boy did that mean I had my work cut out for me. I was throwing my hat into a historically tough engineering job market while making the lateral switch back to an individual contributor after 4 years of not coding as an engineering manager. When I eventually started applying to companies, recruiters frequently wanted to confirm that I had meant to apply for an IC role.
Looking back, I can categorize my time in two distinct buckets.
I spent time having fun
I jumped into adjacent domains I wanted to dive deeper into. I jumped into new domains I knew little about. I reached flow state and worked late into the night on building or writing. I rediscovered the joy and sense of adventure that comes with programming - understanding a system enough to hypothesize improvements and implement those with great success. I even tackled capture-the-flag-style interview problems just for fun, knowing they likely wouldn’t lead to an interview. Ramp had a particularly fun challenge to decode a message buried in a noisy DOM tree, and completing that did indeed not result in an interview.
I fully remade my personal website. I wrote technical posts about what I was learning. One of those posts even made the front page of r/programming with almost 100 upvotes!
It was actually terrifying to see this many people visiting my website
I spent time being uncomfortable
It’s news to no one that interviewing has been incredibly stressful and full of humbling setbacks. I kept myself going by focusing on consistent improvement, understanding progress is not linear, and repeating to myself that “not knowing something” is a temporary state. However, along with giving myself grace, I was brutally honest with myself about where I was falling short. I kept a ledger of interview failures and focused on fixing my understanding to avoid repeating the same mistakes. I threw any knowledge I needed to retain into spaced repetition Anki flashcards and quizzed myself on subway rides. I tracked every LeetCode problem I’ve done, revisiting problems I had trouble with until I solved them - then again, until I solved them in under 15 minutes. I spent hours verbally talking (not chatting) to AI tools about system design until I could confidently explain how contention issues might make optimistic concurrency control a poor fit or quickly suggest different database indexes to improve read performance.
Some problems I’d return to many times.
Toward the end of my interview cycle, I was confidently passing all of my technical rounds. I would sometimes finish DSA rounds early - I once had 30 minutes to spare that I spent going deep on the role & team. System design interviewers would give me feedback like “that was fun” or “this is basically what we have in production”.
In the end, I was fortunate to receive two strong offers - enough for me to stop interviewing. The first offer I earned from my time being uncomfortable, by showing a depth of experience and understanding that proved I could be successful in the role and beyond. The second offer I earned from time having fun, by doing actual work on real-time services that were directly relevant to this team. Significant portions of my interview loop were spent discussing the “how” and “why” of my relevant personal projects.
I had a lot of help
I have a number of people I want to thank. A lot of folks gave referrals that often opened doors for me. While I didn’t convert these to offers (thankfully most loops got to onsites 😮💨), all of these experiences helped make me stronger.
Oscar - for sending me a job listing that I got an offer for!
Zameer and Joe - a simple referral would have been plenty but you guys also pushed hard for me internally, for that I am deeply grateful.
Lauren, Jee, Recurse Center (Laura, Sonali), Yujin, Jennifer, Megan, Zach, Lisa, Christian, Connie, Aldrich, Krishanu, Dom, Chen - for believing in me enough to put your name on a referral (or offer to). And some of you multiple times 🙏!
My parents, James, Amber, Lauren, Christian, George, Rui, Julia - for helping me weigh my offers or listening to me process setbacks along the way.
Thank you all — I’m certain none of this would have happened without your support. I owe each of you a drink 😉.