Chatted with a senior dev at 2am and it flipped my whole plan

I was dead set on chasing a management track after 5 years in QA. Last month I got stuck on a late deploy with Sarah, a principal engineer with 20 years in. She told me she turned down a director role twice because she likes actually building stuff. Said the money would be nice but she'd lose the part of the job that keeps her awake for fun reasons. That hit me hard because I've been forcing myself to want a title and a corner office when I really love debugging weird edge cases. Now I'm looking at staff engineer paths instead. Has anyone else had a random late-night conversation totally reroute their career?

2 comments

2 Comments

sarah1988d ago

wait is it just me or does this kind of stuff happen way more often than people talk about? i swear the best career advice i've ever gotten came from random convos at 3am during a deploy or over coffee with someone i barely knew. it's like the universe lines up the right person to say the exact thing you needed to hear but couldn't see yourself. i've noticed it with my friends too - one girl was killing herself trying to be a manager because she thought that was the only way up, then her roommate's dad casually mentioned he went back to coding after a year of hating management and suddenly it clicked for her. these moments hit hardest when you're not looking for them, i think because your guard is down and you can actually hear what someone's saying instead of filtering it through your own "should do" list. glad you ran into that dev, sounds like she saved you from a few years of being miserable in meetings lol.

evan_stone8d ago

Yeah that part about your guard being down is key. You can't hear real advice when your brain is already screaming "but I'm supposed to do this." It's like we spend so much time trying to climb the ladder we forget to look sideways and see there's a whole other path. Those random 3am convos hit different because nobody's selling anything, nobody's trying to impress anybody. Just two tired people talking real. And isn't that when the truth actually comes out?