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Follow Your Weird: My Career Advice
In my last several of my roles, I’ve spent time mentoring early-career engineers. Reasonably enough, they ask me questions like “Did I join the right company?” or “Did I start in the right role?”
I answer: “You did.”
Sometimes they ask me this question in reverse: “Did I waste my time by learning this language” or “Did I miss out on my optimal career trajectory because I didn’t do such-and-such program at such-and-such school?” or “Did I doom my career by not starting in a team with some buzzword in its name?”
I answer: “You didn’t.”
In their position of vulnerability and youth, they don’t have the background to understand my gnomic replies. Oftentimes, our relationship is still new and they don’t know me well enough to simply trust me. So this post is an attempt to tell everyone that your career choices will be the perfect provided you follow one simple rule: follow your weird.
The Most Important Video Game Ever (For Me)
Over the years, I’ve played lots of video games and loved a great many of them: from side-scroller bliss with the Mario series to adult meditations on humanity (The Last of Us), Nietzschean philosophy (Dark Souls), and surviving grief (Silent Hill 2). While some of these were moving if not profound, the game that changed my life the most was “LOGIC LEVELS.”
This game stands out because it ultimately presaged my interest in logic and gates and also making hands-on learning fun. This seed would lead to the dial-up internet on a SCO V Unix in a shell; it would lead to the BBS era; it would lead to the philosophy degree and the IS degree and all those elective hours chocked full of foreign languages … just pretty much everything that I like. In some ways, there was a seed of me-ness on that Commodore 64 5¼ inch diskette.
As for the game play, perhaps showing is better than telling:
But what’s been so vexing about this game is that for the last several decades, I couldn’t remember its name and had the frustrating task of describing something that meant a lot to me, but which the world, largely, seemed to have forgotten.
