My Decade in Review

A personal reflection.

My Decade in Review

January 1, 2020

I started this decade as a first-year college student fresh out of high school. I was 17, didn’t have a job, didn’t have any industry connections, and really didn’t know shit. And now you’re reading my blog! I would have been proud.

I’ve told bits and pieces of my story on different podcasts. Now feels like an appropriate time to write down the parts that were most memorable to me.

Every person’s story is unique and not directly reproducible. I’ve benefited immensely from the privilege of being born in an upper middle class family and looking like a typical coder stereotype. People took chances on me. Still, I hope that sharing my story can be helpful to compare our experiences. Even if our circumstances are too different, at least you might find some of it entertaining.

2010

I was born in Russia and I finished the high school there in 2009. In Russia, higher education is free if you do well enough at tests. I tried my chances with a few colleges. I was particularly hoping to get into one college whose students often won programming competitions (which I thought was cool at the time).

However, it turned out my math exam scores weren’t good enough. So there were not many options I could choose from that had to do with programming. From the remaining options, I picked a college that gave Macbooks to students. (Remember the white plastic ones with GarageBand? They were the best.)

By the summer of 2010, I had just finished my first year there. It turned out that there wasn’t going to be much programming in the curriculum for two more years. But there was a lot of linear algebra, physics, and other subjects I didn’t find particularly interesting. Everything was well in the beginning, but I started slacking off and skipping lectures that I had to wake up early for. My gaps in knowledge gradually snowballed, and most of what I remember from my first year in the university is the anxiety associated with feeling like a total failure.

Even for subjects I knew well, things didn’t quite go as I planned. Our English classes were very rudimentary, and I got a verbal approval from the teacher to skip most of them. But when I came for the final test, I wasn’t allowed to turn it in unless I pay money for hours of “catch up training” with the same teacher. This experience left me resentful and suspicious of higher education.

Aside from being a lousy student, I was also in my first serious relationship — and it wasn’t going very well either. I was unhappy, but I thought that you can solve this by continuing to be unhappy and “fixing” it. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the wisdom to get out of a non-working relationship for a few more years.

Now onto the bright side. Professionally, 2010 was an exciting year for me. I got my first job as a software developer! Here’s how that happened.

There was a small venue close to my college that hosted different events. This venue was a “business incubator” — mind you, not a Silicon Valley kind of business incubator — but a tiny Russian one. I have no idea what businesses they “incubated”. However, they hosted a talk about software development, and I decided to check it out because I was starving for that kind of content. I didn’t know any programmers in real life, and I didn’t know meetups existed!

I don’t remember what the talk was about now. But I knew the person who gave it was an executive in a Russian-American outsourcing company. I’ve been programming since 12, so I approached him and asked if they’re hiring. He gave me an email, I went through their test exercises, and in a few weeks got the job.

I started at my first job during the summer of 2010. My salary was $18k/year (yes that’s 18 and not 180). This is peanuts in the developed world, but again, this was Russia — so the rent was cheap too. I immediately moved out of my mom’s apartment and started renting a room for $150 a month. I was excited. With my first salary, I bought an iPhone and marvelled at how good the UI was.

Summer came and went, and then the second college year started. But it started without me. Now that I was doing actual work and people payed me for it, I lost my last bits of motivation for sitting at lectures and doing exercises. I stopped going there and didn’t show up for the midterm exams. I returned my Macbook. The only time I went there again was five years later, to pick up my papers.

A short digression. I’m not saying colleges are worthless, or that you should drop out. It was the right decision for me, but I knew I could fall back on my family (more on that later) when things are tough. I also already had a job.

I had the privilege to be seen as knowledgeable by default due to my background (a guy who started coding early). People who don’t fit this stereotype often get a degree just to gain access to that assumed competence. So there’s that.

2011

Most of my job was fixing up poor code after cheaper outsourcing companies. Having no industry experience myself, I overengineered every project to try every cool technology I could get my hands on. I even put random Microsoft Research projects in production. Sorry about that. I did some good work too.

My first interesting work project involved a trip. Our client was an investment group in New York. I still don’t know anything about investments, but basically they had an email system that received orders, and those orders needed to go through different levels of approval. They had a service that manages that, but the service was extremely flaky, and nobody could figure out how it works. My job was to go onsite, work from New York for a month, and fix the service.

The service was written by a contractor from a cheaper outsourcing company. Nine years later, I still remember his name. The most memorable part of that code was a single thirty thousand line function. To figure out what it does, I had to print it on paper, lay out the sheets on my desk, and annotate them with a pencil. It turned out that it was the same block of code, repeated fifty times with different conditions. I guess someone was paid by the number of lines of code.

I spent that month adding a shitton of logging to figure out what the service does in production, and then rebuilding it from scratch to be less flaky. Working with a non-tech company was a perplexing experience. For example, I couldn’t push a bugfix without writing a Word document describing my changes and getting the IT department head to sign off on it. Now that’s some code review.

Close to the end of my trip, I went to see a concert at a bar late at night. The next morning I was supposed to present my month of work to the client. My meeting was scheduled for 9am. Unfortunately, I overslept and only woke up at 1pm that day. My manager apologized for me, and I went home bitterly embarrassed.

There were no repercussions at work. The project was a success overall, and the client knew I’m some weird Russian dude who doesn’t know how to groom his hair. But I knew I made a fool of myself. I also wasn’t particularly looking forward to more “enterprise projects”. Work became a chore.

I was back in Saint Petersburg in Russia. In the summer, the sky there doesn’t go dark. During one night of soul-searching, I hopped from a bar to another with a vague sense of unease. Around 7am, a lightbulb went off in my head. I ate a shawarma, took a subway to the office, waited for HR, and quit my job.

My friend was planning a trip to Crimea (before it got annexed) and asked if I would like to join. I packed up a tent and an old Nokia phone that held battery for a week. We camped for two weeks, mostly naked, in a fog of alternative mind states. I barely remember anything from that trip except two episodes.

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