Earlier this year, after working at LivingSocial for four years, I switched things up and started at ShippingEasy. I didn’t make much of it at the time. I feel like too much is made of it these days.
These are jobs, not adventures.
It has, thankfully, become cliché to get excited about the next adventure. Instead, I’m going to flip the script and tell you about my LivingSocial “adventure”.
- Once upon a time I joined a team with all the promise in the world
- And as a sharp person I’d meet there told me, the grass is always greenish-brown, no matter how astroturf-green it seems from the outset
- I wrestled a monolith (two, depending on how you count)
- I joined a team, attempted to reimplement Heroku, and fell quite a bit short
- I wandered a bit, fighting little skirmishes with the monolith and pulling services out of it
- I ended up in light management, helping the people taking the monolith head on
- I gradually wandered up to an architectural tower, but tried my best not to line it in ivory
- I had good days where stuff got done in the tower
- And I had days where I feng shui’d the tower without really moving the ball forward
- In April, it was time for me to hand the keys to the tower over to other sharp folks and spread what I’ve learned elsewhere
- In the end, I worked with a lot of smart and wonderful people at LivingSocial.
Sadly, there was no fairy tale ending. About a third of the people I worked with ended up leaving before I did. Another third were laid off in the nth round of layoffs just after I left. The other third made it all the way through to Groupon’s acquisition of LivingSocial.
It was not a happy ending or a classic adventure. It was an interesting, quirky tale.
