hey kyle how are you today i'm good how
are you
thank you i'm doing good
i really appreciate what you do for us
you know we're a young non-profit and
you have been so generous with your time
and your skills
and i really appreciate all your help i
also know that you have this
you know you've been at google for a
while
and
you've gone from different paths right
software engineer manager individual
contributor
and
you know you've been in in us then you
went to canada you've had a lot of
different roles in your life you want to
tell me a little bit about why you move
from one place to the other
Starting out as a software engineer
yeah yeah so you're right i started off
um out of college as a software engineer
um i just thought my career path was i'm
gonna be a coder my entire life and i'll
just you know go up a ladder you know
whatever that meant but i wasn't
thinking too much about it
um and then after about five years in um
i started to realize that i was i was
getting a little bit um bored or
just not learning you know that i was
just doing a lot of the same stuff over
and over
um
and at that time it happened to be a
good time in my team
that we were expanding and needed a
manager to join um so i volunteered i
said yeah hey can i try to be a manager
yeah
and uh and i did and
that worked out really well so i was i
was excited and interested in doing that
yeah
and then yeah as you're saying also i
was getting a little bit bored in my
position as a manager and then there was
an opportunity to move to toronto to
open up a new office
um so i did that and that was a lot of
fun um
now yeah
eventually decided management
was i've had enough of that and now i've
come back to being a software engineer
back to being an individual contributor
so i mean everybody aspires to be a
manager right you look forward to doing
the role that you report to
and you wanted to step i would say uh
step down to become an individual
contributor and what was the reason for
that
Being a manager
yeah um it's kind of like what i was
saying before in that um
as an engineer i kind of got bored or i
wasn't learning
as a manager i kind of got to the same
point after being a manager for about 10
years
that was one part of it of just like you
know i'm starting to get interested
again i want to go back and learn
different technologies
but then there was also like the the
anxiety about it um being a manager is
hard um it's uh difficult when working
with you know real humans going through
situations in their life
um trying to help the people that are
really good be as best as they can
but the really hard part for me was
always
with poor performers you know trying to
help people that aren't doing well i'm
giving them feedback helping them out
and it i would just internalize a lot of
it and think that it's like this is my
fault what am i going to do tomorrow i'm
going to dread tomorrow because i know
i'm going to have to talk with this
person and it's just going to be a
difficult conversation and
i just couldn't take it anymore
yeah the performance reviews are
particularly bad
not only for uh employees but also for
managers i wish i had a manager like you
because
[Laughter]
thank you
my
i actually had a lot of good managers
but
one was a particularly bad manager and
i think you would need to remember the
bad guys mostly yeah
and i'm sure plenty of people along the
way also thought that i was a bad
manager you know i had i had my things i
was good at and i had my things that i
wasn't so good at uh you know
recognizing that's part of part of
everybody yeah
yeah so i think i guess using the mental
health aspect of it made you you know
find more happiness over um a title
Optimizing for happiness
yeah exactly um you know generally i've
been thinking about my life and my
career as optimizing for happiness on a
day-to-day um
day-to-day
career day-to-day
responsibilities i guess my duties yeah
i know plenty of people also friends
that were very like career driven to go
up and you know focusing on titles um
want to make a lot of money and that's
great and everything um but i was never
like that i've i've never really been in
that for the money um by all means i'm
doing fine um but i never you know i
never optimized never tried to make my
career path um go up as fast as possible
yeah
i guess the style yeah i know that's
fantastic to hear that you chose
happiness over
you know
just the titles
for
that's that's such a great story
and thank you again so much for being on
our platform i'm sure there'll be a lot
of people who learn from your journey
thanks kyle great yeah thank you
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