An American Engineer in France
This post is also available in French.
In April of this year, I made the decision to move my family from San Francisco to Paris, France; I had an opportunity to help open the Paris office for my company and this seemed to me to be the opportunity of a lifetime. After much pondering and soul searching, we prepared to for a new adventure. We gave away as much as we could, packed what we needed, and shuttled our cats and 2 year old child onto the 11 hour flight.
Soon, we had arrived in Paris, and we were enjoying wonderful meals of wine, cheese, and (of course) baguettes, with only lingering memories of the burritos, Chinese food and beers we had left behind. A lot changed very quickly for us, and I’m looking forward to sharing these details in the future. If there’s a particular topic you’re interested in, please don’t hesitate to comment or reach out to me with your questions or ideas.
After we became settled in Paris, one question I found myself asking often was “How did I get here?”
I spent the better part of the late 2000s in San Francisco, working off-and-on as an engineer for startups, for Apple, again with other startups, and eventually started consulting for myself in 2013. As anyone that has run their own business knows, it is exhausting to search for and manage clients and doing the work for your clients at the same time. In the fall of 2013, I joined a proper consultancy — Pivotal Labs in San Francisco. Over the course of the next three years I learned a lot while working as an engineer (and later engineering manager) in teams that followed Agile and Extreme Programming methodologies. It was during this time that I learned first hand the benefits of balanced team, User Centered Design and LEAN startup. Compared to my earlier work experiences, working at Pivotal was amazingly freeing to be able to rapidly deliver working software, whether it be an mobile app, webapp, highly concurrent services in Go, or a monolothic application.
By early 2017, I knew I was ready for something new, something challenging and different. One small problem however, was that I didn’t want to leave Pivotal. Luckily one important part of Pivotal’s management philosophy is to always be preparing you for whatever you want to do next (whether that’s part of Pivotal or not). For decades, I’ve been fascinated with French culture, and my manager at Pivotal often placed me on projects with other french speakers, or projects that required french translations. Once I heard that there was an opportunity to move to France, I immediately knew it was right for me.
Now that I’m here, there are obviously things I miss, but I couldn’t be happier working with small cross functional teams, delivering working software that has immense value for our users. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever go back, but the events of the the past few months reassure me that I’ve made the right choice. Paris is a beautiful city and we’re building a wonderful team — we’re even hiring!
À plus !
