I'm starting a new job!

Editor's note: This post was supposed to go out on the 1st of December. Due to... foreseeable life busyness getting in the way, it was regretfully delayed by over a week. Please excuse this editor's inability to find an earlier time to edit this! 😬

After months of searching the software development market, I've found a job! 🎉 Or, so I don't claim credit for what I have not done: after applying in different places, I've been found by a company willing to employ me! 😊 Or better yet, as it was an answer to prayers: I've been blessed with a job. ✨

The job is at Schwarz Group's StackIT cloud, where I will be working with Go and Rust to create a serverless functions service as part of their "Runtimes" team. If all goes well, that serverless API would be available to other IT teams within the Schwarz Group to use for their products and projects—which is good, as I need that experience of working with end-users and clients.

In a lot of ways, starting this job is is a chapter break in the story of my life.

And I'm both excited and terrified to turn the page.

A stylized book with a page turning, because I need a cover image and Inkscape is cool.

Challenges

Corporate world

So far, I've always worked remotely at small companies that offered flexible part-time hours. That left me plenty of time for cool activities like blogging, which I made good use of. Also, I often took responsibilities unrelated to software development, from documentation, to marketing, to administration, and everything in between.

Meanwhile, StackIT is a part of a huge conglomerate/corporation with multiple layers and subdivisions—that I will need to learn to navigate. The culture revolves around spending at least one day a week at the office, and having daily video meetings to stay in sync. And I'm unlikely to ever work on any other user-facing portions of the product than the software stack.

I expect that would be quite the cultural shock to me. I have no clue if I would enjoy the change of pace, but I figure I would learn what the corporate world looks like from the inside, if nothing else.

Managing sleep and energy

This being my first "proper" full-time job is probably the largest change for me. I'm not used to managing the pressure of a long days of work, spacing up work with rests, and finding time for things outside of a job without infringing on contracted hours.

As such, getting into a healthy rhythm will take some time. It doesn't help that as soon as I get into the habit, I'll have two weeks of holidays to deal with. 😂

Professionalism

I've seen many cynics grow disillusioned with corporate jobs; a mentor of mine used to say that corporate is like kindergarten for adults, while others have opined that team buildings are a farce pulled by management to feel better for themselves.

Yet, I know that whatever I do, I should "work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men". And I would rather be person who takes things seriously, and insists on every single word's importance, rather than be yet another cynic who considers everything "b.s."

So... I want to challenge myself to be a professional, in every regard. This company/corporation is my client. And it's my job to respect them as such—understanding their issues, reading and applying their policies, attending their events, socializing with my teammates—and being purposeful in all I do in my workdays.
And while respecting my client, I should insist on being respected as a professional in turn. I'm bringing an proven development workflow with a track record of solving complex issues and creating novel solutions. And I'm also bringing standards—in ethics and interpersonal relationships—which include not forcing proprietary solutions, advertisements, and unreliable LLM outputs on others. If the corporation has an issue respecting any of that, I'd rather part ways than play a game of disrespecting them in turn.

Changes

For the last few years, I've considered Open Source to be my calling: I want to build a world thriving with open-source software, where artists can create art unencumbered by copyright licenses, in culture and setting that supports creatives out of love for their work and not fear of getting sued.

With that in mind, my plan was to find or make an open-source project (like, Xee), slowly build it up into a top-of-its-class product, then build a small business/foundation around it. It would have been daunting, but it would have given me chance to live in the future I want to build, and see for myself all of the deficiencies of the present.

Now, however, I'm looking at the prospect of having a stable source of income but precious little time to work on open-source myself. So, to keep the dream of working on open-source alive, I want to make things a bit more bearable for others. I haven't decided what percentage of my monthly budget will go to open-source, but I'm planning to set up a few good-sized monthly donations to open-source projects that make the world better, listen to their users, and are overall awesome. Projects like KDE and LibreOffice come to mind.

And well, once I've gotten my fill of corporate experience, I can come back and work in earnest, full-time, applying everything I've learned, to work on the future, which is open-source.

The role of this website

I got my first ever three interview invitations about a week after I first mentioned looking for a job on my website's /now page. I imagine it has more to do with the time of the year (late fall) than with anything related to my website, but the coincidence makes me feel like the words I publish here have more weight and meaning than words I write elsewhere 😁

If you are reading this post—thank you. It brings so much joy to share my odd little world with others 💚 And to the one person who contacted me off of what I wrote on that /now page—thank you in particular for reminding that nothing is ever done in vain! ✨

On my second interview at Schwarz, I got to experience the awesomeness of having a small website, since the person who interviewed me had taken the time to scroll through my About and Ideas page and speedily went through the topics like "I also like open-source, a WASM game engine would be awesome, libertarianism is cool, ...", and so on, to the point that I almost had no need to introduce myself.

As such, I would rather continue maintaining this website as I go through full-time work. Posts are likely to come out less frequently, though, as I have to balance my job as well.

This has been my 34th article for #100DaysToOffload. Here is to seeing how this new experience changes me! (And whether it means I'll end up at 75DaysToOffload or less)

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