3 minute read

"Be Diverse, Like Healthy Soil"

TL;DR

I’m pivoting towards a multi-modal system of income sources starting with tech consulting and farming. That includes technical advising startups, hands-on cloud and DevOps work, and…farm work!

Updated Career Goals

After a really complicated year and about 6 months of job searching, I’ve taken a step back to reflect on where I need my career to go. As a result, two key goals for my career are:

  1. Maintain my passion and curiosity for systems engineering
  2. Develop skills and experience in agricultural business operations

My longer-term goal is to establish a business that helps small and medium size agricultural businesses become anti-fragile (thrive under adversity), preferrably putting to good use my technology background.

Doing only one of these things and not the other won’t cut it to accomplish the longer-term goal, so I must diversify my portfolio of experiences across the two domains.

How Nature Likes Things

Nature abhors a vaccum and thrives when provided diverse inputs. In a vaccum of job opportunities and meaningful facts about why various companies hesitate to hire a qualified, experienced, and seasoned professional for their open sales engineering roles…it’s natural for me to feel like I need to divest my full-time efforts on the full-time corporate job search front. Rather, I shall be investing in other opportunities which, while not as financially lucrative, support my longer-term life and career objectives: farming and technical advisor hands on work.

There’s a famous quote from Dutch microbiologist Becking: “Everything is everywhere, but the environment selects.” In my case, the specific corporate environment I was in (without going into detail) did not further select my particular flavor of effectiveness on a product manager track, despite a great record in sales engineering and customer retention work. It took a while to get over that, but after a year of new people and research, I’m better for the diversity of feedback and options it drove.

Nature also doesn’t mind overloading fledgling species with challenges…environmental, competitive, biological…and there are millions of them that didn’t make it compared to those we encounter regularly. I didn’t realize how challenging the job market would be in 2024 and how dysfunctional high tech talent acquisition had gotten since 2015. For both candidates and hiring organizations, doing the work to find a ‘great fit’ and then having the courage to see it through has become scarce.

My Diverse and Unnatural Career Journey

Particularly because I have never been a single-track expert, rather a polyglot that can learn fast and focus on results over ‘activity’, I am ‘fit for many purposes’. This is not necessarily a good thing in practice since I think recruiters are confused about my non-linear career choices. With the “15 seconds or less” that they have to look at each resume, many people involved in talent acquisition don’t see the narrow characteristics they’re looking for in mine.

I’ve gotten feedback that “there’s nothing wrong with this resume” and “you’ve got some really interesting experience”, and in off-the-record discussions I’ve heard that “AI isn’t really there yet”…to help them sift through dozens of incoming applications per day. So all I can do there is dig out the more personal connections and referrals to even get a screening call. Just today, I DM’d a hiring manager after applying (including resume and details) but got back “Hi Paul, thanks for your note and interest. I did not see any Sales Engineer experience. Where on your work history was that?”…which leads me to believe that there are fundamental gaps and break-downs in many hiring processes.

Still Focused on Doing My Personal Best

Doing my best now means growing the pool of job opportunities beyond the high tech industry…and specifically is NOT making the most money I can make. I still have to make enough money to cover ‘carrying costs’ of living in eastern Massachusetts and support my family, but this is not the first time in our life here that we’ve had to run lean.

The fact is, sustainable agricultural requires healthy soil, which requires mindful management of inputs. Sustainable income for me no longer means accepting income from a single (corporate, full-time) source, mindful management means diversifying my career efforts.

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