— Heraclitus of EphesusIf you do not expect the unexpected, you will not find it; for it is hard to be sought out, and difficult
The world around you can change at a moment's notice. The quote above by the philosopher Heraclitus is a much more telling quote than most likely realize. It is something that I have always held to be a truism. The month of March has reminded me that even if you expect the unexpected, things are sometimes going to be overly complicated, chaotic, and—most of all—absolutely wonderful.
At the beginning of March, I had a plan. And like all plans that I make, it was a fairly complex set of conditions that needed to go smoothly for these plans to be truly effective. I had planned on finding a place in my hometown of Mobile, Alabama, so I could move out of a highly restrictive lease in Gulf Shores, about an hour or so from Mobile where I held my first salaried position at a regional publishing agency. For work, I was going to do what I have done for the bulk of my career thus far: freelance.
I had saved up a decent bit of money from my previous contract position that I had planned to use to live off while working on finding some small contracts and freelance projects to start saving towards moving to San Francisco, CA at the end of the summer. To be honest, I enjoy small business web development a lot less now than I did before I began following the startup sector of the web industry. In order to really break out of doing nothing but small business web development, I felt like I needed to re-evaluate a lot of things in my life, which is one of the reasons why I decided to completely start over on my personal site.
Since I already had decided when and where I was going for the next stage in my career (and life), I signed a six-month lease in Mobile, AL and moved into my current apartment on March 5th, 2010 (somewhat coincidentally, the same day that I updated my site to the current blogazine style site). I had no intentions of looking for a full-time position anywhere until May or June, when I expected to be a bit more financially and emotionally stable and really ready to undertake the often harrowing process of searching for a job in the middle of a difficult economy with no proven experience at working in the ecosystem of a SF Bay / Silicon Valley area company, let alone a startup.
At the same time, though, I was ready and willing to talk with and apply to jobs if they were brought to me because the company thought I'd be a good fit. After I had revised my portfolio, I started getting e-mails and phone calls from recruiters all over the place. A few big names caught my interest early in March, but the companies themselves were not doing the recruiting. Most of them were headhunters. Let's be honest: the quality of jobs gotten via outsourced headhunters is disappointing.
Then, late on a Friday night in mid-March, I received a LinkedIn InMail from a recruiter who was not working for some company with the word "Solutions" or "Resources" in their name. His name was Alex, and he worked for a company located in downtown San Francisco looking for a front end web developer. Checking out his LinkedIn profile, it was obvious he was not an outsourced headhunter and the company he worked for was responsible for a large, reputable site, so I responded in the affirmative when he asked if I would be interested in applying for the position.
For the next two weeks, I would go through a variety of emails, phone calls, and finally a last-minute flight out to San Francisco for a series of in-person interviews. After meeting the team in person, getting to see what the company does and how they are looking to evolve, and having my love for San Francisco renewed by even a brief visit, the company gave me an offer.
As you might have guessed, I accepted the offer.
As of April 12th, in the role of User Interface Engineer, I will be joining the team building the front-end of one of the world's most popular social entertainment sites, frequented by over 50 million users a month for games, friends, and more:
hi5
The moral of the story here is that very good things can happen when you are least expecting them, and that you should never sign a six-month lease when you are looking for a job, whether doing so actively or passively. Oops.
See you soon, San Francisco.
For more information on hi5, check out the site at http://hi5.com, read up on the latest from the company on the hi5 blog, or see the business details and articles about the company on hi5's Crunchbase Profile.
