Bloggit > Moving to San Francisco & Quarter Life Crisises

I signed an offer with Audax Health last friday as a full stack software engineer working on health tech. Now, on the cusp of relocating across the country to the west coast, I’m reminded of my last year here at Advanced Systems Concepts. While I’ve certainly learned a lot from our software architect before he left, the last year has been full of what I identify as “transitional woes.” Having spent the weekend with a girl who has been pretty influential in my life, she described her now 25th birthday as the beginning to her “quarter life crisis.” This is certainly a phrase that I’ve never heard before, but strangely have identified with plenty of times in my life.

My older sister is four years my better and seems to have her entire life planned out. She’s chalked up to be married this labor day, on track to finish her MBA, and has completed pretty illustrious internships/full time positions in the business and finance industry. As her little brother, I’ve often felt unable to measure up to such accomplishments, which incidentally led to my feelings of “transitional woe.” I would describe this feeling as this sort of irrational feeling of going nowhere. It likens to being trapped in a glass dome, where you can see your dreams and brighter futures, but thinking that there are no doors in this place to lead you there.

I’ve been interviewing for close to 4-5 months before I finally landed this job. I was a software engineer with a single interview under his belt. Now after getting a recruiter and individually applying to opportunities, I feel that I have the confidence to properly market myself in the industry. My recruiter constantly pressured me to apply for front end roles, ( surprise their specialty was placing front end engineers), to no avail. Finally I put myself out there for more full stack and even back end roles. Sure, I don’t have as much experience in the back end, but it is definitely in area I have a huge interest in.

Something my 30-something friend always tells me is that if you’re unhappy about your current status in life. Fucking change it! There’s no reason for wallowing in your own unhappiness, just do something about it. Well this sound a bit preachy now, but I just felt like writing something about it.

-Eric