Today is my last day at Vimeo. On Sunday, I'll fly to California, and next week I'll be onboarding as a data scientist at Meta. (Again.)
The day to day right now is the good stuff. Remote flexible means I have an office to go to if I want to, but I'm never forced to, so I usually don't. I roll out of bed just in time for 9:45 standup, and my sleep scores have never been better. My co-workers are nice, relaxed, and forgiving. All to say, Vimeo gives me all the benefits, maybe more, of a job. I have a steady paycheck, some regular human contact, legibility, and because I was only there for about a month, I didn’t really experience the emotional volatility that comes with desperately needing to keep said job. In a labor market where absolutely no one is having a good time, this is was a pretty sweet deal.
The simple explanation for why I'm leaving is that I'm selling out. The salary difference was enough that literally no one at Vimeo begrudged my quitting. My manager gave me a speech about how we're all mercenaries. Salt in the wound: they are good people.
I wish it was more complicated than that. From Alex, who was exploring technical-ish jobs:
Part of what motivated this thought process is a desire to minimize the amount of time that I have to spend working and also minimize the amount of time I spend burning my "coding battery" so I can use it for other things. What I learned about myself is that, for better or worse, there are close to zero jobs out there were my work:output ratio is better than just making software, so if I have things I want to do outside of work but I also want to collect a paycheck, I should just do the thing I'm good at that's easy to get hired for that doesn't burn me out too much.
I'm hoping that data science is the thing that I'm good at that doesn't burn me out too much. That might be dumb, given my recent work history and my past experience at Meta, but I always felt like I could be a good data scientist. I want to use my coding, my research battery for other things, and I think that unfortunately, the easiest thing for me to do, is to go back to what I know how to do (kind of).
My boss at Vimeo actually said something along these lines: people only pay for very good, so you should do the things you're good at mostly and cover up the rest or do the rest in your own time.
Still, I'm leaving Vimeo with a massive Notion to-do titled "Be a Professional Engineer" undone. The job was a dream in a lot of ways, one of which was that I wanted to be an engineer and they let me be an engineer. There's something very tangible about software engineering that you don't get in data science. Something was broken, and I fixed it. I changed some stuff, check out this cool demo. Compare that with trying to build ... an understanding? Become a thought leader?? "Influence" "Decisions" ? Who even knows what the point of data science is.
Wanting to become a "professional software engineer" is not a very good goal though. If we're counting by W2s, then I'm done here right? But it doesn't feel done. What do I actually want, when I say I want to be a professional engineer?
A sense of competence maybe. A sense of empowerment too, like I can actually do things. The ability to quickly write correct programs to solve problems that I couldn't solve before. Know that others aren't pulling the wool over my eyes with systems I don't (or worse, can't) understand. I think there are also some habits of mind that working with software cultivates that would be good for me: breaking problems down into logical parts, generating and testing hypotheses, paying attention to details.
I felt out of my depth in a lot of ways at Vimeo. Whatever my goal is, I'm not quite there yet, I know that. Wherever the destination, the road is paved with raw output.