One of my favorite games as a teenager was Microsoft’s Age of Empires. The score was riveting, historical lessons fascinating, and game play exciting. My sister and I would play for hours on end and a common pattern would emerge in my game play. I would scope out the corner of the map in which I started, create a thriving village or city in that corner, and then become reluctant and hesitant to explore the areas of the map not visible to me. It was always scary to venture out. In one map, as soon as you stepped away from the village, a pair of lions would attack you. In another map, you started with only two priests and had to convert a few villagers to get a foothold. But right outside that foothold was a massive city full of enemies. Nevertheless, it was not possible to win the game without venturing out. Sooner or later you would run out of resources in your local corner or the enemy (computer) player would eventually venture out themselves and come get you.
Careers are not quite like this. It is perfectly valid and reasonable to settle in to a comfortable job that pays the bills, is reasonably fulfilling, and affords you a balanced life. However, for me personally, my career is like an Age of Empires map. I am always wondering what the non-visible areas of the map hold. Are there lions? Are there gold mines? What will I learn and how will I grow? Twenty five years later, the tension between my natural instinct to stay put where I am and my desire to explore the full map still remains.
Looking back at my career, it was really scary to move from the Windows team to Bing. I absolutely loved my coworkers on Windows and I am still in touch with many of them. But I learned so much about building large scale server-side distributed computing systems on the Bing team and made new lifelong friends. Indeed, the last time I was in a bar before Covid hit was at Brass Tacks in San Francisco with my manager from the Bing days.
Leaving Bing for business school was even more scary. I remember taking a road trip to the Washington wine country (Walla Walla – it’s beautiful!) right before leaving for b-school and wondering why I was leaving all these wonderful friends and great life behind to pivot my career into something else. Yet business school turned out to be two of the most wonderful years of my adult life. The classes, the friends, and the experiences were just some of the richest parts of my life’s tapestry.
After b-school I spent nearly five years at Google where I learned to be a product manager. Google was and remains such a great place to learn from some of the smartest people in the technology industry. As with all prior phases of my life, I still see my Google friends frequently. However, moving to Meta was the next phase of the map to explore.
The last four years at Meta have pushed my growth even further. I’ve been fortunate to have the best managers, mentors, and teams and worked on one of the most challenging projects in the technology industry. One of the great things about the Meta culture is that no matter how good you are at your job, you always get clear and actionable feedback on how to continue to grow and improve.
So if you’re thinking of leaving the campfire to go off exploring into the wilderness, I really encourage you to take the leap. There are a lot of goldmines, woods, and fisheries out there to explore. You might encounter some lions as well, but I’m sure you can handle them.
PS: To any Meta colleagues who might read too much into this: Don’t get too excited, you are not rid of me for a while. Like I said, one of the great things about Meta’s culture is that you are always pushed to keep growing and improving.