StackMob

Publié le 16 août 2015 par Jonathan

I recently left my job as a software developer at Zynga and now I work at Stackmob. I had been at Zynga for two years, had a bunch of stock in the company, was paid well for a single 25 year old dude, and I knew in my gut for the last 6 months of that job that I had to get out.

After I left, I took a bit of time off to chill and reflect a bit, and I spent some time trying to answer 2 questions:

Why didn t I leave immediately after I got the “gut” feeling?
Why did I end up leaving when I did?

The first one is easy. The golden handcuffs were on the whole time I worked there. When I talked to people about possibly leaving, I frequently got the response “stay at Zynga and cash out.” So I took the advice and stayed a while at Zynga.

The second one is tougher. I eventually got out of the cuffs. I switched teams and projects a few times inside Zynga, looking for something I was happy with. I obviously didn’t find it, but the process was super valuable for me. I reflected a lot, and learned more about myself more during that time than ever.

Eventually I halted everything and reflected on my life in a quarter-life-crisis type moment.

I came up with a ranking of my top 5 priorities for my ideal job/life (like I said, QLC FTW):

learning (anything, but preferably internet technology things)
writing code
working with smart, nice people
playing soccer
making money

Really, the top 3 are tied for first place, but the rankings are as accurate as I could get them after a weekend of thought. I love code, and probably always will, but this reflection period was the first time I realized that there were other things that make a difference in my happiness: personal and professional development (see #1), relationships (#3), and balance (#4). Those terms make them sound lame, and things that I wouldn’t want to do, but they actually are important.

And then there’s #5. Money is on there because without it, numbers 1-4 are impossible. Many people have told me that money is most important (props to the people who didn t - you know who you are), and almost everything I read and see in the world measures success based on money and power. I only ranked money in my top 5 because I dont want to live on the street. At this point in my life, other things make me happy, and that was really important for me to realize.

Zynga was giving me a lot of money, and the promise of more money later, but I wasn’t getting the other stuff at work, so I had to leave.

Conveniently, it was easy to see what I should do next: either be a professional soccer player and write code for a hobby or be a professional coder and play soccer for a hobby. The first one was and is much less likely than the second, and I suspect I’ll be happier as a professional coder (or maybe that’s what people say when they can’t be professional athletes), so I looked for a new job as a software engineer, and kept soccer as a hobby.

I’m happy with where I ended up, and I’m glad I went through this 6+ month learning process. Of course, there are certainly many people besides me for whom working at Zynga is great, but in my 2 weeks so far at Stackmob, I’ve been happy. Ive been learning, excited for what my peers and I are working on, and I’ve enjoyed working with everyone at the company. And I’m still getting paid to write code. And I still play soccer on thursdays, fridays and sundays.

I feel like I should say this

Everything I wrote here is completely my own narrative and opinion. I wrote it because I felt like it, nobody asked me to.