AbeSkywalker

I'm an E7 at Meta (principal-ish). I worked hard to get here. Here are all of the ways I was privileged/got lucky (in chronological order): 1) When I was in college, my mom wanted to start an online dating site. She had personal insight. I studied marketing and English in school and these were the skills that I lent to the endeavor. But I also met a software developer there and this was where I first learned that I loved to code. This person was crucial as I discovered coding and was generous with their time. 2) I got a job at a marketing agency that also built websites. They let me—a junior digital marketer—spend time helping build the websites even though I had no idea what I was doing: my job was to run ads. I also was lucky enough to meet some incredibly smart people there that are still my friends. 3) My girlfriend (gf at the time, wife now), decided to move to New York. I decided to follow her and quit my agency job (above). I knew I liked programming so I did a dev bootcamp. Flatiron school. I hit this trend at the *perfect* time. 4) I was offered two jobs out of bootcamp. The first was at an in-house developer at a VC. This job sounded SO cool/chic. The second was a tiny startup. It turned out that this startup used the same PHP framework (codeigniter) that the dating site used and this was one of the reasons they offered my the job (so lucky). 5) I chose the tiny startup because of the people there. It was 100% a vibes decision. I think on paper most people would have chosen the VC. 6) This turned out to be the best job I ever had. Everyone I worked with was extremely smart. I was also lucky enough to land in a situation working with senior engineers who were extremely competent and also willing to lend their time to me. I was able to do things like introduce react to the company, shard a mysql DB and run a multi-billion record elastic search cluster. 7) It just so happened that this company was in social media analytics and our major platform was Facebook. After about two years working there, Facebook bought our company. There is no way I would have gotten a job at Facebook otherwise. I've now spent over a decade building large scale applications at Meta/Facebook and at startups. The point is that it feels to me like I'm driving along and I've hit every green light. It doesn't mean I don't know how to drive, but I'm an idiot if I don't recognize the lucky pattern. If you feel similar, I want to hear your story. If you feel like you're in the opposite situation, I want to hear how I can help.