Focus

Discussing plans, from a personal perspective, for the next 4 months.

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The short of it is that I’m leaning back into full engineering mode. I can’t and don’t want to transition fully back, since I of course still have my duties as a Fulbright ETA and my comparative history project Hey Falcon, Hey Dragon. However, I personally have an overwhelming itch to make a big systems project and mess around creating things, and more practically I need to put projects on my resume before I start hiring loops in April.

I’ve been advised that instead of thinking solely in incremental steps or broad long-term goals, you should combine the two - have a horizon, then create a sub-goal for every day / week / month that moves you towards that horizon. With that in mind, my main horizon goal is to find “home”, whatever that means, and

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The big thing is that I will be outputting a lot more code and doing a lot more learning outside of work than I was in the past few months. I’ve done better than I thought I might at maintaining my skills than I thought I would in October or November. However, I am not somewhere where I can easily push myself - Poland has extremely talented engineers, but for the most part they are in Warsaw, Gdanśk, Poznań, and other big cities that I can’t regularly visit. I cannot have conversations in Łomża anywhere close to the level of conversations that I had in Ann Arbor or that I can have in Seattle, San Fransisco, Boston, New York, Houston…you get the point.

The nice thing is that it’s very normal now to chat with knowledgeable folks online. Amir Satvat has a great list of mentors here that I plan on engaging with bit by bit. Additionally, I’ve been fortunate enough to make professional connections with engineers in-person throughout Europe, and I still have plenty of folks I can ping from North America. The tricky thing becomes balancing doing my own work versus engaging with . Everyone encourages me (and I think by extension all young professionals who want to grow) to network network network and to keep having these conversations; however, I sometimes feel like I talk too much and don’t spend enough time in the IDE. Talking about ideas in software engineering and evolving those ideas by discussion comes more naturally for me than going at it in practice; I’m not sure if this is a genuine preference, some weird ego thing, or something different entirely.

If I’m being honest, there’s a lot of anxiety over whether I’ll get something “good”, in the field I want, or…well, at all? I mean, it’s really not that good in tech generally, and it’s especially rough in games and entertainment broadly. I think a good systems engineer will be able to find work somewhere, though, and the ability to go 95-100%¹ the way into a piece of tech is a valuable skill that can be useful in any sector I choose.

Realistically, I think I’ll get something; I highly doubt it will be the one job that I work for the rest of my life, but that’s okay. I just have to manage my future-anxiety and focus on what I can do now to reach that future - no, not that future, but a future where I’m happy with my work.

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There’s a fair bit to be said about mental “grounded-ness” - I was probably depressed for a couple months while on my grant, and since realizing that I have gone on an upswing re: productivity and overall happiness. The way I see it, mental health ebbs and flows just like physical health; sometimes you get a cold and feel like crap for a week, sometimes you feel down for no particularly obvious reason and feel like crap for a while. However, I think I can do a better job of taking care of myself, and I think I have been doing a better job compared to the start of my grant, and I think there’s more I can do to continue feeling better.

I have been trying to write more soulful, from-the-heart stuff while here in Poland because I want to think about life and what the heck I’m going to do with it while I’m still a participant. However, my writing started to become more “mental health”¹-focused and less insightful, which I think is problematic. I think it’s fine to talk about emotions and difficult things in public, but if you’re sharing something openly, then there should be a more useful takeaway than “I am sad” - you can’t place an expectation on online strangers or acquaintances to pluck you out of a bad phase. Some things should be restricted to friends.

Given how focused I am on work and landing a job, I could say “you don’t get hired to talk about your feelings”. This is true but misses a more important point: you don’t create or nurture relationships by being stuck in your feelings. True friends will stop and slow down to help you, but I think all people - including those true friends - ultimately want to do things with their lives², and I think the point of relationships is to do things together and grow through life together, rather than letting life happen to you. Stagnation is nasty.

For me, the solution was realizing I was checking off all the boxes for depression and subsequently scheduling a therapy appointment. Even before the appointment I tried to turn around my mental state by taking up more software work and reaching out to old friends and acquaintances³. To some extent this has resulted in me becoming more emotionally flat, but I think that’s fine. Once I’ve sorted out what I’m doing and where I’ll be from August 2024 onward, I think I’ll be in a more comfortable state, and I think I’ll return to some emotional equilibrium in between how I feel right now and how I felt in late 2023.

The one nagging thing is that having all these things to do makes me afraid I will miss out on a lot in my remaining 4 months in Poland. This misses out on the fact that I am constantly missing out on every single thing that is not the exact thing I am not doing right now. More practically, I am missing out on being in the environment I was in back in the world of American software, and I think that is both professionally and personally a much bigger thing for me to miss out on than most of the things I can find in Poland or Europe right now. I have a short list of things that I still want to see and do here (in particular Hey Dragon Hey Falcon); I’m not going to stress about experiencing more things than that.

In short - expect less essays, less emotional / from the heart stuff for a while. Doesn’t mean I’m not feeling those things, but I am managing them better and taking more control over them than I was in the past few months.

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I wonder if we are ever meant to find stability? Humanity was a nomadic species, but from what I know the groups we traveled with were relatively constant⁴.

A friend of mine once said that home ought to be something you take with you where you go, not something you explicity find. Ever since August, this line of reasoning makes more and more sense to me. The question, then, remains: have I found home? Will I find home?

1. Interesting here because I have been using the 80-20 principle to manage all the projects I’m juggling here, but I was also advised that being able to show the ability to close out that remaining 20% is very valuable on a resume. Which makes sense, no one releases an 80%-complete product and says “yay we did great!”. ↩ ↩²

2. Personally this is a central tenet against the notion that the purpose of life is happiness. Maybe the pursuit of happiness is a suitable purpose depending on how you define “pursuit”, but having euphoria be your only goal just makes you a hedonist and severely stymies your growth. It’s good to have some pain and difficulty in your life because pain and difficulty teach you how to be better and how to do more of what you really want to do - something more specific than getting a dopamine rush. ↩

3. Not an amazing solution; one of my problems (and one of the reasons I didn’t jump directly into SWE) is that I overwork and miss out on big chunks of life because of that. Still, it’s better than sitting around and being miserable. ↩

4. Interesting thing to think about tbh, not really something I want to rabbit hole into atm tho ↩