7 minute read

"To Found and Seek"

TL;DR

The Sabbatical Is Over

My last job didn’t suck until it did. I was great at what I did for Neotys and then tried something called ‘Incubation Engineering’ at just the wrong time. Leadership changed, the corporate focus did too, and I was asked to be a first-time product manager for an internal platform. Everything beyond that was an uphill battle. After six months and with no cultural adoption path, I exited with little but experiences and some savings to show for it.

So I took the summer to enjoy time with my family, volunteer on some farms, and do some serious research about founding an AgTech startup. I did have early discussions about other employment options, but it all felt too ‘rebound relationship’. I also only had nine months of product management experience which in an industry that expects you to have more than five years of it to hold any job means that I would have had to make that my only career focus. Given the punishment and less-than-worthwhile salaries non-senior PMs pull down, it didn’t make sense to subject myself to more of that.

I also worked on a ton of micro-projects at home, nailed my gardening season, and set up a homelab (software and infra). ‘Time flies when you’re having fun’ as they say, but in a way it really didn’t. I was working without assurance of a future safety net and that kept me awake quite a few nights, but I’ve learned to move on and live my truth which is: I do what it takes, often more, and things will be okay.

The Startup Will Take Time

The short version is that the startup I WANT TO FOUND is going to take a longer runway than I have right now and I don’t want to use other peoples’ money to do this. Unlike singles with no dependents, I have a more important responsibility to them than to my ideal startup.

It’s taken time to absorb context from a lot of books, blogs, videos, podcasts, farmers, farm hands, and even Agricultural conference-goers. There’s much in terms of traditional agriculture which is already worked out. Same with traditional applications of digital technology in that space. A naive outlook on the AgTech space would conclude that there are only niche categories of marginal improvements to be had there, but somehow I emerge the prior incubation experience still believing that there are new/novel and profitable ideas not yet had. At the very least there are untapped convolutions of biological and human interactions that can somehow benefit people.

Growgistics is my startup, but it’s on pause until I can establish the bootstrap capital and find an equally passionate co-founder to work it hard with me. By my calculations, this will take at least 3 years of my own further employment in a reasonably well-paying and full-time employment opportunity to develop.

The Job Search Is On for Real

I restarted conversations with a few really qualified early employer targets in October. Then I co-organized DevOpsDays Boston for the fifth (and final) year in a row. I also knew that hiring in Q4 is fraught, but the time to plant trees is always twenty years ago, so I also began to reach out to direct contacts and fill out applications in mid-November.

Since that time, I’ve filled out dozens of applications for sales engineering roles I have the background for and could fulfill, talked to employers inside and outside the high tech space inundated with a backlog of candidates, watched as industry friends far more credentialed and active than I have been laid off as well…the labor market is absolutely nuts. I even asked my prior colleagues to weigh in with testimonials and everyone was more than happy to do so.

What I am focused on is what I do best, helping people understand what they need to in order to adopt new technology and making that an honest and useful spend of effort on both sides. I think of my current high tech employment prospects in terms of three fitness aspects:

Fitness Me Them
Of timing after a short break, seeking since November holding on key hiring until Q1
Of experience complex software and/or enterprise customers identified PMF but growing to enterprise customers
Of maturity know what I can do best and take lest career risks need focused, committed team players

“Why doesn’t Paul have a job yet?”

In short, I was fortunate to have enough planned economic runway to not rush with whom and where I work. I also just started seriously looking only two months ago, which was in the middle of Q4, and the end of December is nuts for everyone. Also for those who haven’t been on a job hunt recently, you should try it; it’s brutal as many will attest to.

I’ve had some good early conversations, but few of them have struck me as compatible for one reason or another. The ones that send pre-conversation rejections are often due to “we already accepted someone else further down the funnel than you” or because of a lack of specialized skills (i.e. certifications and technologies) either unstated or not directly matching the posting nice-to-haves.

So for people asking “why doesn’t Paul have a job?” which has included recruiters, potential hiring managers, random industry people who ask where I work, and even a few of my (clueless) friends…to them I say: “because I haven’t found the right fit yet”.

What I’m Working On in the Mean Time

The past 7 months have not been boring or a waste. I have gotten so many things done that the prior job just didn’t provide time or headspace for. In retrospect, I now see that it’s important to retain an afternoon a weekend to do ‘me time’ (or at least digital housekeeping and upkeep) to continuously keep this in balance.

For now, every morning, I get a fresh coffee and kick out a TODO list for the day. It always starts with “have to’s” first, then any “get to” projects. My have-tos are prioritized first with professional, then house-related things, then volunteering. It’s my low tech personal kanban.

Of the projects I’ve completed recently or currently working on are:

  • (current) Co-chair of ‘IEEE P2675.2 Observability’
  • Concluding DevOpsDays Boston
    • Driving down sponsorships (few as they were)
    • Planning and on-site logistics for two days
    • Driving communications strategy (emails, social, promos)
    • Producing the videos
  • Organizing Boston DevOps meetup
    • May, July, Sept, Dec, and now January
    • Onboarding new organizers and volunteers
  • AgTech
    • Research on Monit and commodity sensor platform
    • Exercises using LangChain for automating key research tasks
    • Identification / narrowing of focus to greenhouse (and adjacent task) automation
  • set up a homelab which includes:
    • kubernetes (microk8s) for my hobby APIs, Minecraft server, build and deploy infra, and testing tech
    • migrating data and services off of AWS for $200/month cost savings
    • localized ‘observability stack’ including OpenTelemetry components, Grafana, Prometheus, Jaeger, etc.
    • long-term storage of no-SQL and timeseries data using Mongo and Influx
    • tinkering with an SDN to read my energy meter (props to Don Luchini for the inspiration last year)
  • Personal greenhouse
    • API development and data retention tasks
  • revitalize my personal infra (not homelab)
    • highly redundant long-term storage on a NAS (open source) using Intel NUCs
      • part of my personal 3-2-1 data backup strategy
      • mirrored to a cloud as encrypted blob data
      • easy to swap out encrypted clone drives and store a copy off-site (for fire protection)
    • 3d printer, reliable and regularly used
    • family device management (mostly to manage kid safety and screen time)
    • disaster recovery plan (security, data, identity)
    • password management and rotation strategy

If this seems like a lot, well, it doesn’t even cover the Growgistics/AgTech research stuff (because much of that is in ‘stealth’ mode, at least for now). It also doesn’t include consolidating my rental office down to my home office for cost-cutting measures (it was nice to have while it lasted). And it doesn’t capture all the family walks, game nights, and creative projects that have contributed to my positive outlook despite the job market over the past month.

Conclusions

This is not a summary. People rarely read summaries at the bottom of blogs, even less when they’re on personal sites. If you want all blogs to contain a final section summing things up, congrats, you can now become a $200/month ChatGPT Power User.

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