The Sixth Five-Year Plan

Last updated: Wed Jul 17 2024

Hello frens,

I recently put in my two weeks’ notice.

When I joined Asana in the summer of 2019 as a fresh-faced new grad, my plan was to stay for four or five years, make it to senior engineer, then return “home” via a Vancouver-based team, preferably with enough saved for a downpayment.

Given I’m not writing this from a house along SW Marine Dr, the plan clearly underwent some adjustments along the way.

I tend to plan about three-to-five years at a time — I even recommended it as one of my 28 pieces of advice for 28! Anything shorter is more like a yearly goal — not enough to give a complete sense of meaning or progression — and anything longer is subject to the whims of Mother Time — obviated by deviations large and small that add up to an unforeseeable future.

So, as I came up on the end of that five-year plan, a sense of stagnation settled in. With some time to think provided by a break in wedding season, I realized it’s time to try something new — especially since the job market for software engineers is picking up.

So I put in my two weeks’ notice, and as of June 22 I will no longer be employed at Asana.

The mood? Anti-climactic. Relieved. Bittersweet.

I spent something like 10,000 hours¹ working at Asana. Sherry recently noted that I spent longer at Asana than I did at UBC (it certainly does not feel like it). No matter the ups and downs, employment at Asana was a major part of my life.

Accepting an offer at another company does not, by itself, constitute a five-year plan, however. The next few years will be particularly interesting, because, as I noted on my 27th birthday (almost a year and a half ago!), I am now reaching an age where choices will definitively close off other choices at an accelerating rate. I strongly suspect I already know the contents of the next five-year plan, after all.

I am still thinking about what I’d like to do over the next few years. Should I take my career more seriously than I have recently — aim for staff engineer, start giving conference talks, obsessively build side projects? Is it still worth taking up illustration, as I planned to do at the start of this year? Whatever happened to my love of music?

One thing is sure, though: I will finish my latest manuscript, Psyche & Mnemosyne. I haven’t talked about this much publicly, since I don’t want to become the kind of person that constantly talks about writing a novel and never actually writes a novel. More importantly, I have a habit of saying that “this one is the one,” yet you’ve likely never seen any of the other novels I wrote (for good reasons and bad).

But this one… this one is the one 😉

Oh, also, I got married, but maybe I’ll talk about that another time. Or, perhaps, never, because, to paraphrase John Green, once something is public, it can never be private again.

You’ll hear from me again in two weeks,
Russell

P.S. You may have noticed this newsletter has a different style than previous ones. I’m going to try writing these as actual letters from now on, which also means this is the start of a new season of rwblog, just like House of the Dragon.