Time Off, Time On

For awhile, devrel was the best work I could do. The world changed, and now it isn’t.

After 4.5 years at Okta, today is my last day. I’m leaving a good role on a good team, with greater potential than I materialized from it. More on that some other time, probably with a link to the backfill req, because I would sincerely recommend it to someone who’s at the right place in their career. But it’s not what I’m at the right place in my career for any more. I don’t have what I need to do my best possible work right now, and what I need starts with a set of systems that only I can build.

Systems, done right, take more effort to build than to maintain. The scope of what systems it’s possible for me to build with the tools at my disposal is greater now than it’s ever been before,and some of my deepest curiosities surround the question of what I can make of myself with the resources I’ve gathered. These resources now include access to a variety of wish-granting machines, and I already know that there are many chains of small, carefully-scoped wishes grantable by those machines in their current form, which reshape my environment in a way that reshapes my abilities. I don’t know yet where that line of inquiry ends up, but it’s time to find out.

I don’t usually talk about money here, but it’d be irresponsible to omit at least a passing mention of how it’s normally a terrible idea to leave a role without a next salary lined up. In a win for impostor syndrome, spending a decade in the tech industry with the expectation that it would kick me out at any moment has created a financial situation of artisinal home-made privilege in which it’s neither reckless nor stupid for me to take some time off. You can buy all kinds of things by saving up enough money, and what I’m buying for myself this year is time.