As I sit here listening to "Control Freak" by Armin van Buuren (if you know, you know), I think about how positive I am about so many things. I feel like the world at large is headed toward a turning point. I see positive things happening among friends. My long-term financial prognosis is improving. My health is apparently solid (forthcoming cardiac CT not withstanding).
And yet, there's this thing hanging over my head. The thing is obviously finding another job. One that is amazing and exciting and shows potential the way my job at Angi did. Ugh, it still bums me out. How often do you get to work with the same people for four years-ish that you adore? To be fair, the first month post un-jobbed, I was content to do nothing but do stuff that fed the soul and just mess around. This was followed by a month of concern around Diana's appendectomy and the bizarre complications that came after. But by early March, I was focused on landing a new thing.
I've had four serious loops in that time, and they all ended in defeat for various reasons that either don't sit well or are a mystery. (There's a larger debrief for this to come later.) I'm in two loops now, but I can't easily assume the best, just because of the previous things. It's just so different from 2022, where I was fighting off parasitic recruiters and had multiple options and offers, because I'm experienced. I'm coming off of my most successful job in my entire career. I have numbers that show it. It shouldn't be so hard.
Meanwhile, I built a full-on social network that is fantastic, with all of the features you'd expect. It doesn't invent anything new, but it's ad and algorithm-free, and I love it. I'm not really the marketing type to figure out how to sell it, but it's solid. I look over at the tablet playing music (now it's Sofi Tukker's "Purple Hat"), and love the improvements I've made this year. Heck, I've made some solid improvements on various backend functions of CoasterBuzz, which I haven't touched in years. Agentic AI coding is fantastic. I'm not sure that I've ever been this excited about tech stuff.
But I need another job. One that lasts two or three years would get me to a solid spot that I could in fact "offboard" or whatever. It can be longer, for sure. If the people are awesome and I'm enjoying it, I wouldn't move on. It's not that I don't want to work, it's that I want to do stuff that is awesome. Angi as a company was "meh" in terms of its intent, but I worked with some of the best people I've ever worked with. I miss that.
Trying to disassociate identity with work is harder than I thought.
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