One day in early spring, Dex got dressed in the traditional red and brown of their order, bypassed the kitchen for the first time in the nine years that they’d lived at Meadow Den, and walked into the Keeper’s office.

“I’m changing my vocation,” Sibling Dex said.

—A Psalm for the Wild-Built, by Becky Chambers

Three years and just under five months ago, I joined LaunchDarkly. Today, as of 5pm PDT, I no longer work for LaunchDarkly.

I’d love to be really clear about why not. To explain the choice in full and outline my reasons. But I’m not confident I know why not. I have a lot of reasons, but those reasons were true six months ago, too. Why now? Well, because.

The truth is, I don’t know. I woke up, looked around, said “It’s time to be doing something else.” and gave notice.

I’ve never done that before. I’ve never been able to do that before. This is the first time in my career I’ve gotten to the last day of employment at one company and not known where I was going to be working next.

It’s scary, and that makes me suspicious it’s the right thing to be doing.

Tonight, I’m hanging out with my husband and our toddler. As I told the HR professional who conducted my exit interview, my next job title is “dad”. I have a very patient husband who would love to be able to do anything at all between 9 and 5 without a toddler being involved, and a toddler on the cusp of talking who wants his Other Dad’s attention and to maybe play with that keyboard Other Dad gets to spend all day playing with. For now, what’s next is them.

We aren’t in a financial position where that can be forever, though, and I don’t know how long it’ll be for or what comes after it. What’s wild is it will only be the third time in almost fifteen years that I’ve been publicly available to hire.

If you’d like what comes next after “dad” to be working for your company, shoot an email to hire@paddy.dev. Tell me about what you’re doing, and what you hope I’d help you with.

Here are the things I’m looking for in a job, to save you some time:

• I won’t come into your office. Don’t ask. An occasional (max like four a year) offsite with a team or annual company gathering? Sure. Anything you’re tempted to categorize as hybrid? I’m not doing it.
• I have a lot of deep expertise in Go. I have a strong preference for working in Go, but for the right company am willing to use other languages. “What you hope I’d help you with” should probably be engineering leadership things that emphasize leveling up teammates, in that case. Accept that I would be navigating a new-to-me situation if you hired me, but one I’m confident in my ability to navigate.
• I don’t want to be a manager. I am happy to be in a leadership role but I do not want that leadership to be conducted under the shadow of institutional authority.
• I don’t want to work on blockchains or AI. I have some tolerance for you making an AI play, because every tech company in existence is having to explain to investors what their AI strategy is. But if you don’t think someone skeptical of the long-term value prop of LLMs is a good fit for your company, that’s me.
• I want to work in a high-trust environment. I want to be given hard problems and work collaboratively to solve them. I want my experience to be valued and I want to learn from others’ experience. I want to work with people who care about understanding a problem space and making choices about navigating it. I want to work on a team that’s trying to build both software and also a team that will provide a solid foundation for the next ten years. I want to work with people who understand that the team is a system for building systems, and tuning that meta-system yields disproportionate rewards.
• I want to solve problems. I don’t want to not be able to solve problems because people don’t believe they can be solved.
• I want to view my coworkers (not just my teammates) as allies trying to solve the same or similar problems. I do not want to jockey against them for power. I do not want to deal with them jockeying against me for power. I understand there’s some amount of this in every job, but know that I care about showing up at work to work on problems, not to play status games, and if status games are required for every problem, I’m not going to be happy or last very long.
• I want asynchronous work to be valued. I actually really like meetings, but I need them to be a tool used in the proper way, not the hammer that’s deployed on every problem that could be a nail if you squint. Either have or have an appetite for a work culture that values writing and reading, and deploys meetings for specific value that couldn’t be obtained through writing and reading.
• I’ve spent most my career in developer tooling and that’s where I feel most at home, but I am very open to branching out into other areas.
• I have a lot of thoughts and opinions on billing, authentication, infrastructure management, and APIs. I am very open to branching out into other areas.
• I do love open source and community stewardship, but that is definitely not a requirement.
• I’m not really interested in non-senior roles. A lot of the value I bring to an org is I’m pretty good at leveling up my coworkers. If you’re not looking for that, you’re wasting your money on me.

It’s a long list, it’s not exhaustive, and it’s not like my eventual next thing will tick every box. But hopefully it gives people enough to get a feel for me as an employee.

I am not actively trying to get hired today. I will probably be really hesitant to start a new job until at least mid-June, and I’m not convinced I’ll have a job this year. But for the right opportunity, I’m available.

For now, I’m gonna go play with my kid.