I spent a lot of time in my early career jumping from company to company looking for the next better thing, be it tech stack, job title, pay package. It worked quite well for me early on, until I interviewed for a principal engineer role at Branch and the VP said something that struck right to my core… that I had a good interview and good experience but my work history showed someone who wouldn’t be there in two years, and they were hiring for a long term role.
I’ve vowed since then to stick it out, to work hard building something better at the companies I work at, and to make it obvious from my resume and day to day that I care about being somewhere long term. I take the idea of leaving my campsite better than I found it seriously, and if Clojure was just a fun hobby for me I wouldn’t try to introduce it at work. I think my colleagues can learn a lot from the language and paradigms that are at the core of the language, my hope isn’t that we re-write our stack in Clojure, or even that the services I write in it persist past when I leave. My hope is that I can use it as an example to show the other engineers I work with a better way, even if we do it with go in most of the stack.
I’ve vowed since then to stick it out, to work hard building something better at the companies I work at, and to make it obvious from my resume and day to day that I care about being somewhere long term. I take the idea of leaving my campsite better than I found it seriously, and if Clojure was just a fun hobby for me I wouldn’t try to introduce it at work. I think my colleagues can learn a lot from the language and paradigms that are at the core of the language, my hope isn’t that we re-write our stack in Clojure, or even that the services I write in it persist past when I leave. My hope is that I can use it as an example to show the other engineers I work with a better way, even if we do it with go in most of the stack.