15 Years and a Whole Lot of Luck

How you, too, can quit your dream job and move back to your home town

The first time I remember writing “code”, I was in 8th grade. I was the president of the Technological Student Association and our group was tasked with building a robot out of Lego’s and entering it in a competition against hundreds of other teams. I wasn’t designated the programmer because of my good math skills ( I have none ) or even because my father was a programmer and we thought that maybe I was born with some innate skill ( spoiler alert: that’s not how knowledge works ). Truth be told, the only reason I was chosen to be the programmer for the project at all was because no one else wanted to.

In hindsight, the team should have picked a different person to code the robot. We not only lost but lost hard. Our robot didn’t even make it past the preliminaries against a bunch of 5th graders. This massive failure to beat “children” in a game of logic should have been the first and last nail in my developer coffin but instead it lit a fire that has never stopped burning.

The following year, I was lucky enough to take an HTML class instead of another typing class. I don’t remember the teacher nor how to use tables for layouts ( this was pre CSS Zen Garden days ) but I do remember the first time I clicked “See Page Source” and saw this garble of characters that somehow made the computer print “Hello, Tim” on the screen.

I didn’t know how but I knew at that moment that talking to this machine was what I wanted to do with my life. It was a vast schism between what I knew then and what I would need to learn in order to make anything more than text appear on screen, but being understood by something was more than I could have asked for growing up.

I grew up mostly in Tennessee, in a small town of about 30k people. My house was filled with runaways and orphans, my parents taking literally the commandment to take care of the widows and orphans, along with our own family of 9. Most nights I’d be lucky to find a bed to sleep on, usually relegating myself to sleeping on dirty clothes in the laundry room as the couch was already taken.

I remember everyone in the house seeming like friends, pairing up by ages as if connection and support are round-robin draft picks, while I was the odd one out: too old to be close to the younger ones, too young to be accepted by the older ones for anything other than a good joke.

This feeling of not belonging seems to be my leitmotif. My stutter had made me feel alienated since kindergarten and now that I was in high school, the cliques had all decided that taking on a stuttering, lanky nerd wasn’t good for their social capital.

It wasn’t until that first “View page source” experience did I truly feel that my thoughts, the very foundation for who I had been, were understood. Up until that point, I had always felt that there was something wrong with me, that the reasons why I wasn’t prom king or the ring leader of the circles of Popular Kids were all personal, all personality or physical shortcomings. I felt that since no one seemed to understand my perspective or even be able to see my point of view, that there must be something wrong with me. But this computer thing, this worker that just reads texts, can understand exactly what I mean.

It was around the time that I started making MySpace themes and GeoCity sites that the idea of working at a start-up in Silicon Valley was planted. I didn’t know how I’d make it there, or what project I’d be working on, but I knew that I would some day walk along Market St, up to my office, and be working with the greatest minds of my generation.

It is the last part, looking back, that this whole journey has been about. I loved San Francisco and working on interesting and hard problems with some great people, but the longer I am on this path and the longer I’ve chased the goal line, the more I am realizing that it wasn’t the computer that I was searching for, but the community behind it.

It was around ’08 or ’09 that I started doing more than dreaming about landing my first developer job. I had been building web pages for four years and thought that I was ready for the Big Leagues.

My first interview asked me a simple question about callbacks and my illusion of being good enough was shattered. I felt that I knew nothing. That all the hard work I had put in over the last 4 years was a waste. Worst of all, I felt that even though I had finally found this thing that understood me, the social constructs around that thing were just as hard to break into as the high school cliques.

After that interview, I cried. A lot. The first time in my life, I had found a group of people that saw the world the same way I did, a tribe that I thought was mine, and I was being turned away from it.

After thinking about it and throwing one hell of a pity-party, I figured that even though I didn’t know anything now, that wasn’t stopping me from learning it now. All I had to do was learn what the people were hiring for and then I could break into the field. I thought that if I could become good enough for these people, however they rank that, I could finally be a part of the tribe that I had been dreaming of my whole life.

The question then became: “What do I learn?” I scraped the web the best I could in those days, trying to assimilate as much information as I possibly could, to digest any sort of question the interviewers might ask. I memorized words and phrases that had no bearing to my reality or my mental model. I was jumping through hoops just like I was in high school, with similar results. It wasn’t until I decided to fail every interview did I start to gain traction.

Around 2011 or so when Node had just started to become in play, I knew enough about jQuery and vanilla JS to have landed a few freelance gigs and a part-time remote Front-End developer position but was still interviewing in The Valley, hoping to land my moonshot, and working manual labor jobs from March to August in order to have food and sometimes a place to sleep.

My strategy was simple: make them ask me questions I don’t know, write down what they asked, and then spend the next week mastering that question. I knew I would fail for the first few years, that I would have to go through the trials and face the threshold guardians time and time again, but that I would gain first-hand knowledge of what these companies were looking for, what their rubric for success looked like. I applied to literally every position that was open on Indeed or Dice, lied through my teeth on my resumes, and would take any interview anyone offered.

That is what I did. For years. Set myself up for failure just so I could gain a tad bit of “insider knowledge”. I failed over and over again, some times hearing the held-back laughter of my interviewers, other times having them flat out call me out on my lies. The once mystical land of acceptance and understanding that 14 year old Tim had experienced long ago was becoming more and more like having to learn how to speak to your peers without stuttering or how to maneuver through discussions about people’s feelings. After years of failing, I started to feel that maybe I just wasn’t meant to be in the one tribe I longed for.

It wasn’t until ’15 or ’16 that I “got my break”. Mizner called me during one of my cross-country road trips to offer me an in-house developer position that I had applied to months earlier. During our interview, I felt at peace, as if he was an older brother or even a friend that was helping me through this experience more than a threshold guardian trying to keep me from my goal. It was this specific interview and the corresponding position that I owe everything I am to, even if Mizner doesn’t want to admit it.

My time spent with that team is the only reason the startups started looking at me. The projects I built there taught me more than the interviews, more than the meetups, more than the dummy projects I built for my portfolio. I treated that position as a spring board to my future and it propelled me toward that exact future. More importantly, however, it gave me exactly what I was looking for: a group of friends.

For all the faults and shortcomings of that company, the team always had my back. They always supported me. Always went out of their way to ensure that I was okay. Even when I made horrific choices that cost us more than the projects were worth, Mizner and the team always treated me as family. With all of my issues and feelings of not being good enough, that team showered me with love and are the only reason I’m still in this industry.

However, within about a year, I started to get the nagging feeling again of not being surrounded by like-minded people. The team members, while amazing people, did not idolize the computer like me. They spent their time enjoying themselves and each other instead of pouring over white paper specs. Their idea of growing was not the same idea as mine, even though we held the same ideas and morals. We were, and still are, great friends. But they weren’t my family, my tribe.

Around the winter of ’16, I finally got an offer at a startup. It was 12 years in the making but I had finally reached the end of my journey. I had finally been accepted into the tribe that had made me feel inferior all these years. I was finally in the inner circle and would be surrounded by people that obsessed over the computer as much as I did.

It was for a company called Agorafy, some Zillow clone that was going to become the “Facebook of Real Estate”. I packed all my things into two backpacks and made my trek to New York City. Not quite the Valley but exciting nonetheless.

My first day there, I immediately felt out of place. No one there was nice, no one there was loving. No one there cared about the computer or its job. They only cared about getting paid ( none of us did get paid, which makes their attitudes more logical in hindsight). Only a week had passed before I started looking for another place to work.

In our hotel room in Queens, me and my partner started talking about what the hell we were going to do. We had just moved all of the things we could into backpacks and had spent all of our money on hotel rooms trying to float until our first pay check. She had given up her life in Florida, I had given up mine in Tennessee, all so I could become a part of the tribe I had lived my whole adult life chasing. All of that work, just to be told “fuck off.”

I hop on twitter, trying to busy my mind, and I see a tweet from a Javascript “talent agent” asking for any JS developers in New York. I’m a JS developer in NYC, I thought, I should apply! I did and quickly I was in a screen sharing meeting with E. ( note: Obviously names redacted )

He asked me what I thought were simple questions and within 30 minutes they said that they wanted to “represent” me for a x% cut of any job, book deal, or speaking arrangement they set me up with. I was nearly homeless and would have taken any job they could have offered me.

I told the “agent” that I would take any deal they offered as long as it was immediate. I couldn’t have my partner going hungry just so I could feel accepted for once in my life. Within the day, the “agent” had me an offer from a start-up in the Valley. I was once again at the edge of giving up only to be reeled back in by the promise of finally being surrounded by my tribe.

Not only had they landed me a job in the Valley, they were offering me 1-on-1 mentoring with E, a JavaScript author. I was beyond ecstatic. Not only did I have my dream job but I had someone in my corner that was going to help me overachieve at this position. I felt that I had finally pushed my boulder to the top of the mountain and that this time it wasn’t going to fall. My partner and I packed our backpacks again and moved our things across the country to California, the ending place of my life-long pursuit.

My first few months there were great. I was using state-of-the-art technologies, spearheading projects, and mentoring junior developers. I felt that I was surrounded by people that shared the same common goal of mine, to find their tribe, and that this time I had finally found a place where I could be not only understood but built on top of. I felt that I had found people that saw the world the same way I did.

I started going to meetups in the city that every developer wanted to break into. I started reaching out to those around, trying to find my “in”. I had made it past all the bullshit to finally make it into my tribe, I thought, now I just had to get them to notice me. But as I started reaching out and trying to make my way into their groups, I realized that they were just like the kids in high school, just like the interviewers of years past, just like the team with Mizner: amazing, smart people that valued things differently than me.

At first I tried to play along, thinking that maybe if I just understood what CQRS meant or if I knew how to build RabbitMQ services that I would then be able to be “in” the group. Maybe if I could memorize React’s source code they would see that I knew enough to be a part of the group. Once again, after over a decade of learning, I thought that the reason why I didn’t feel accepted by my peers was because I wasn’t good enough, that I wasn’t knowledgeable enough.

But looking back, it was never me to begin with. Sure, I never should have gotten any of the jobs I applied for and probably should not have even got the gig with Mizner or in the Valley. I own that during this journey I’ve made monumental mistakes. But, the missing piece that kept me from feeling accepted wasn’t my lack of skill or my stutter or my socioeconomic class, it was that I was looking for something other than a job, something other than just friends. I was looking for my tribe and no amount of work or social status would make any other tribe feel right.

I spent a year at my dream job. I met the smartest people on the planet and my skill-set jumped from 0 to 9000 over night. I would not take back my time spent there or at any other position over the years. After that year, though, I could not take the feeling of being alone any longer.

I had grown accustomed to feeling alone growing up but the mountain of my dream job had pushed me to soldier on. Now that the boulder had rolled down to the bottom again, I had no reason to push through. My tribe, I felt, wasn’t here anymore than it was in Knoxville or New York or Cookeville. I once again was the kid that had to sleep on dirty clothes because everyone else was already paired up.

And that’s where the story ends, for now at least. I am still looking for my tribe, still trying to find a way to make my computer understand my thoughts, still trying to find anything that sees the world the way I do even if I have to build it myself. But what these past 15 years or so have taught me is that even without my tribe, I can still do great things.

Even without a room to sleep in, I still had a place to sleep. Even without a mentor to tell me what companies wanted, I still had the ability learn through rejection what that was. Even when I was totally alone, I still had access to this beautiful thing called the internet that I, little stuttering scrawny boy Tim, was able to help create. And if I had access to that, maybe I could create the tribe that I always wanted. Maybe I can put the 30 years of life handing me lemons to good use and give those that are pushing the boulder up the mountain a light reprieve before they head back into a tech world that looks more and more like the high school days that I abhor.