I had a hard time processing the video shared by Brittany Pietsch this week, and it pushed me to think more about my layoff. I had generally reached the “acceptance stage” (Kubler-Ross stages of grief model: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance) for the layoff, but that video pulled me back into the anger range again briefly. Thankfully, I’m now 9+ months removed from the layoff, and those feelings didn’t last too long. Afterward, I had a (somewhat) new revelation: Indeed’s layoff pushed me to do something I would probably have never done on my own, even though I had considered it for a long time. Starting my own company and contracting with several different companies (simultaneously, no less) has been one of the most growth-inducing moves in my career. 

This week and next, I wanted to share about the projects I’ve been working on the last few months. I’ve alluded to them previously, and at least one is still in stealth mode, but the fractional CTO/consulting world is a new one for me so hopefully sharing learnings from this will help others decide when/if to make the jump that I should have more seriously considered years ago. 

The truth is that this work is not that different than my last role at Indeed. There I was leading between seven and 15 teams working on early stage new product innovation. I helped coordinate staffing, budgets, roadmaps, architecture, alignment, and much more. The biggest difference now is that I don’t have a support staff to help me do all of this. I always ran a lean organization, but I also preached as often as I could that “a team of one was no team at all.” But that’s where I am right now. Let’s start back in April of 2023 with the first post-Indeed project I took up.

Commiseration & Encouragement

The day I was laid off, I reached out to two good friends. One invited me out for a beer that afternoon/evening, and the other said “let’s grab coffee in the morning.” Both were exactly what I needed. A chance to vent, commiserate, and complain in a safe space, and then quickly a place to move into brainstorming what’s next and action. In fact, over coffee the friend explained that he had started HeatCheck just a few months before and had been building the MVP with WordPress and ChatGPT. I took a few weeks to think things over and since I had no serious job prospects, figured that sharpening my development skills by rebuilding his application on a more scalable, flexible platform would be a good challenge. Over the course of about a month of work I was able to build the application (including all of the Stripe integration and Progressive Web App hooks.) Not too bad for a rusty old programmer with a fair amount of support from Github’s Copilot. 

I took a break from building this to take the family on vacation, and when I came back finished off the mobile applications (iOS & Android) and started preparing for a more public launch. As we speak we’re preparing the last bits of data for several more sports (Baseball, Softball and more), and working on a Gmail integration for emails & notifications. This project has been a great push to get my hands on code, deployments, monitoring, and all of the nuts and bolts of shipping software that I had gotten so far removed from.

I <3 Coaching

I started my career teaching due to the Dot-Com Crash in the early 2000’s right as I was graduating with a Computer Science degree, specializing in web development. That meant there were little to no web development jobs, and post 9/11 most of the software jobs I was seeing were in Defense related companies that I had no interest in joining. I got the chance to teach Visual Basic and Java over the next year and a half while working on my Masters degree in Information Science & Technology (effectively Applied Computer Science & Management combined). I really enjoyed teaching and always thought that it might be interesting to go back to that space again another time. 

In August I was approached by Emergent Execs (an executive coaching firm here in Austin I had used previously to help train new managers) to help develop a Technical Executive Accellerator curriculum. Over the next few months I wrote a synopsis of the course, dug through existing executive coaching materials, and consulted friends to see what topics I had to include in this training. We’re now thick into the sales and marketing phase of the program launch. Meeting with prospective attendees to see if they are a good fit, would be interested, and have budget for such a program.

I’m excited to share my experiences and materials with managers, directors, VPs, and CTOs in product, engineering, and UX over the next six months. I really want the course to be an accellerant for people’s careers and a meaningful improvement to the teams’ they lead. More than anything, I’m excited to be coaching individuals one-on-one again, as that’s one of the things I miss most post-Indeed.

Fun