{"id":2963,"date":"2024-12-23T17:37:31","date_gmt":"2024-12-24T01:37:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lewczyk.net\/tomswritings\/?p=2963"},"modified":"2025-01-08T18:48:56","modified_gmt":"2025-01-09T02:48:56","slug":"dork","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/lewczyk.net\/tomswritings\/?p=2963","title":{"rendered":"Dork"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><em><mark style=\"background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0);color: #00006d;\" class=\"has-inline-color\">I wrote this about a year and a half go \u2014 but forgot to publish it.<\/mark><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It\u2019s interesting how my career has evolved \u2013 specifically, the role I do for the tech companies for which I work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Everybody is good at some things, and bad at other things. Everyone has a unique personality \u2013 which is a product of their genetics and their experience. And that personality, plus the natural talents that one has, usually determines one\u2019s career path and how good they are at that path.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I am a \u2018natural engineer\u2019. What is that? It means that I am a problem solver. If I see something that needs adjustment\/improvement, I can visualize multiple ways to make it happen, weigh these solutions against each other, and pursue the best path.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If I were sensible, I probably should have followed an \u2018engineering\u2019 career path \u2013 become a fancy technical architect, or maybe pursued engineering management. My challenge was \u2013 the first time I was a manager for engineering teams, I was in a difficult situation:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ol style=\"margin-left:40px;\"><li>I worked for a purchased startup, where the company that bought us only wanted the technology and worldwide offices, and not the local (Silicon Valley) people.<\/li><li>I became the manager of a group where the previous manager had given most people bad reviews, and the company policy was: you needed good reviews for two years to get a promotion. One of my engineers was solid, but I couldn&#8217;t promote her because she had a previous bad review \u2013 she didn\u2019t like that.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n<p>I kept a whiteboard tally in my work office of people who had left the company \u2013 and the tally grew to 100+, which is a lot for a small startup. I eventually left the company, but had such an unhappy experience managing teams (I managed a second team at the same time), that it made me not want to manage teams anymore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>My other two \u2018dork\u2019 factors are:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul style=\"margin-left:40px;\"><li>I am not naturally social. I\u2019m generally an awkward, unsocial person \u2013 who isn\u2019t the most desirable person for people to want to hang with.<\/li><li>I am \u2018secretly smart\u2019 (I use this term a lot). I grew up in a modest state, but once won a statewide math contest (not bad) \u2013 so my brain (over)thinks things well, which allows me to evaluate situations and decide the best\/sensible path. I actually use my overthinking brain to decide the best way to compensate for (hide) my dorkiness.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>At the end of the day, I come across as being smart\/sensible (but slightly dorky), and companies like me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I have followed the path, in the tech companies I have worked for, of being a project\/program manager. It\u2019s sort of like being a people manager, but you don\u2019t have people reporting to you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Without getting too deep, I\u2019ve had a good career. Two regrets:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul style=\"margin-left:40px;\"><li><strong>College Choice<\/strong> &#8211; I grew up in a family that didn&#8217;t focus on college. My parents didn\u2019t go to college. Some of my older siblings went to college (some didn\u2019t graduate). My next older sibling got a bachelors and masters degree \u2013 which steered me toward college \u2013 BUT no one really gave much guidance\/weight to which college I should go to. I paid for my own college, but (wrongly) thought that the only important result was: the degree, and not whether it was a \u2018fancy\u2019 college. My grades (and intelligence) were likely good enough to get me into Stanford? MIT? I likely would have been regarded\/hired better had I done so, but I went to University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign \u2013 not a bad tech school, but not a super fancy\/well-regarded one.<\/li><li><strong>Working vs Launching<\/strong> &#8211; The other thing that didn\u2019t occur to me was \u2013 starting my own company. There are people who start multiple companies, one company actually works well, and they make good money \u2013 I could have done that. Especially since I was \u2018early\u2019 in the tech timeline, and could have started some basic tech companies like: devices (Apple), internet (Google), etc. I\u2019ve worked in tech for decades, and am approaching retirement \u2013 but I still have (modern\/current) ideas that I could pass down to my kids \u2013 so they could do what I didn\u2019t (start companies). (Maybe I could be the CTO for those companies\u2026)<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>In summary, I am awkward socially, but \u2018secretly smart\u2019 \u2013 and use my overthinking brain to fix\/hide my awkwardness. It has worked for me. My career has been good, but it likely could have been better had I been aware of other paths that could have landed me in a better place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Oh well, you can&#8217;t fix the past\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I wrote this about a year and a half go \u2014 but forgot to publish it. It\u2019s interesting how my career has evolved \u2013 specifically, the role I do for the tech companies for which I work. Everybody is good at some things, and bad at other things. Everyone has a unique personality \u2013 which &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"http:\/\/lewczyk.net\/tomswritings\/?p=2963\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Dork&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[18],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/lewczyk.net\/tomswritings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2963"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/lewczyk.net\/tomswritings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/lewczyk.net\/tomswritings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lewczyk.net\/tomswritings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lewczyk.net\/tomswritings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2963"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/lewczyk.net\/tomswritings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2963\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2983,"href":"http:\/\/lewczyk.net\/tomswritings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2963\/revisions\/2983"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/lewczyk.net\/tomswritings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lewczyk.net\/tomswritings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lewczyk.net\/tomswritings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}