Working Harder Won't Set You Free
It may be tempting to consider, but it simply keeps one tethered to the dream
I understand those frustrations, very well. Relating personal experience to a former colleague during one of The Valley's bullshit layoff cycles (it's wealth transfer, nothing more, higher taxes every time). Describing how interviewing and changing jobs is stressful, time consuming, fiscally uncertain, etc. I had recently switched jobs and moved back to California for that position.
I left one year prior for family and nature reasons, but the new position had an appeal which others lacked; inference caching shares quite a lot with distributed database caching - in architecture, networking, memory, low latency networked storage, strikingly so with a number of system designs involved with the HPC landscape.
Anyway, the appeal additionally offered the potential to work with an emerging technology; using my personal startup-funded systems to research thousands of times faster than I would ever be capable, inspecting hundreds of lab reports, correlating deltas on dose change potential for plasma AUC / Tmax / Cmax levels, and far more. These systems had already helped solve a critical medical concern which no neurologist or endocrinologist could answer over many years.
So, we moved. The move could have gone better, and we floated for the first two weeks. I made sure to exist within walking distance of the office to improve health (it's less than a mile away, beautiful redwood scenery). Staying in the area was helpful.
Labs, Everywhere Labs - Except Here
My roles in systems engineering have either required, as part of the job description, for me to build a hardware lab, or running the lab, or actively upgrading one to replace existing ones. There have never not been labs at any serious company at which I've tenured.
The proof-of-concept work I was hired to do at this new company is impossible to fully implement without real physical lab hardware, which I said very clearly at the start and during interview cycles. I asked about the operating system, the laptops, VDI systems, dev boxes and developer resources, the usual. I asked about ADA compliance accommodations, because I am disabled; simply checking all of the usual boxes before signing a contract and relocating my entire life to go slog away for an IPO, right? Right.
I asked, "~why do the dates for the lab deployment keep slipping?" Similarly, as with any project planning questions in general, and as time went on, substantial concerns became clear every successive week:
- Where is the company going?
- Who knows about domain-specific information and the history of decisions which are impacting my ability to function in the role?
- Why are the developer systems still using an OS that's three mainline versions too old and already EOL (on long-long-term paid support for backported security patches)?
- <Insert all of the other questions to which I'll not bore the reader>
About that Cross-Functional Leadership Team
Never found answers to these questions; and I've mostly worked at startups where timelines change quickly and pivots occur and re-orgs have to happen once or twice per year, etc.
- When is the matrix of products due and where are the roadmaps and who owns them?
- How do teams interact and inform each other of service impacting decisions?
- Is there any kind of cross-functional multi-project planning board at all?
- What does the data analytics pipeline look like? (I can build it from zero if needed)
Those are common questions and are always part of my interviews - because it's not just the candidate who is interviewing, the company is being interviewed as well. The answers before moving were just specific enough to trust, but I should never have trusted, not again.
Signs to Depart - Signalled Months in Advance
The company and the management tree I was involved with had failed on all critical accounts to such a degree that I had started looking for new roles several months before giving my notice - why?
Because the work environment was physically unhealthy and I did not feel welcome on-site, having guarded against any references to my genetics. There was a war going on and I was from the side that too many people at the company were viscerally and vehemently vicious towards.
Well then, What to do? What to do?!
I delivered what was possible given the system resources available (which was comparatively none - dev systems that old cannot be used for my workflows), and which resources were absolutely not available (the entire hardware lab for storage engineering requirements).
No NDA issues here, no personal attacks, etc. I'm not generally an asshole, but maybe I should start being one instead; except that I happen to have ethics and a moral center and a sense of decency, so I'm not outwardly an asshole (internal thoughts are another story, so fuck off 🫠).
Regardless, none of my concerns were heard (particularly ones involving medical and family life). Time went on. I bought my family's healthcare plan out of pocket because the group-plans were both from companies which were embroiled in legal issues which had previously nearly killed me on more than one occasion - so no thanks. That substantially cuts into base-salary comp, and when a planned and promised IPO is cancelled - there goes any hope of accruing RSUs that were supposed to be a component of Total Comp after the first year cliff. Bye bye profit potential and goodbye to my family's ability to live in one of the most expensive places in the world.
Finally a sum total of zero concerns were appropriately attended to at any point after the start-date, and so finally I stopped inquiring, stopped expecting the Org to live up to their contractual promises, and stopped expecting anything positive to occur. Nothing positive ever occurred until I left - and it was simply not being involved with the daily environment and experience of being a Jewess of Germanic lineage living with ADA disabilities.
Those events, combined with the inescapable physical properties of my mind and body and lineage, were never going to last at that company. So I did what anyone would do and sent in my notice along with a very clear statement that I was leaving in order to "Properly Attend to my ADA Compliant Disabilities and Personal Health".
We are Very Limited in Time
My general view is that with Ai, we are very limited in time - and not just time to market but time to advancement, time to general-intelligence, and limited on time to innovate in ways which make our day to day lives positive (or quite the opposite).
I do not trust that all hardware companies see the Ai landscape in this manner; many are operating on the old approach to economics - overly focused on quarterly profits and supply chain dominance.
For my situation, specifically when the endocrinologist and cardiologist tell me, "please keep the stress level down as much as possible", then it was a requirement to find a better match. Paying $2K out of pocket for healthcare is just not a long term option, and I can get 100% of that covered almost anywhere in the Valley ecosystem.
