I’m stoked to go to San Francisco!
In one month, I’ll be in San Francisco.
It’s my first time in the US. But San Francisco in particular has something special to me.
American Ambition
I love American culture a lot for its hustle culture. Many Americans, especially in the Bay Area, are ambitious.
I recently read an article about someone who worked 70-hour workweeks at Stripe and loved it. To quote something:
Once a candidate asked me what my favorite period in Stripe’s history was. I thought for a second. “This may be weird, but it was in 2015 when our API was facing major stability issues.” She raised an eyebrow. I started squirming. “You look surprised,” I continued, trying to regain some composure–I was selling her as much as she was selling me. “It’s just that we learned so much about how badly our users needed us and everyone really stuck by each other and made themselves available to help in some really spectacular ways.” I prepared to tell a story about how the sales team ordered a bunch of pizzas to the office for the account management and support team, when they realized we were going to be in for another late night. But she jumped back in. “I guess I am surprised. But it’s mostly because you’re the third person to mention that same thing to me today.”
…
Once your neighbor starts signing off Slack at 3:30 consistently, it’s hard not to do the same. If your closest collaborators don’t turn stuff around quickly, why would you? If there’s no one in the room agitating for doing that extra copy pass to punch up that blog post, why not just ship the meh version and use the extra time for a jog or a drink with friends? The path of least resistance is right in front of us, and we are taking it.
Working in The Netherlands, the experience in the last paragraph rings all too familiar to me. People take the path of least resistance. But the moments I’ve felt the most fun in my engineering jobs, were the moments of coding all night to deliver a great result that was of tremendous benefit to the end user.
Such a job culture comes from people who are not happy just working a 9–5. They want to hustle. They are willing to put in the extra work, to get a bigger payoff. And that’s a mentality I respect.
Smart People
Sustained ambition leads to out-competing peers in raw skills.
When I go to San Francisco, I hope to feel dumb again.
There have been several moments in my life where I felt like the dumbest person in the room:
- When I joined uni, coming from a more practical background.
- Talking to leads in the company I used to work for.
- When discussing theoretical topics in my current job.
That feeling… I can only describe as “magical”. It feels like being as useless as a concrete parachute.
In those kind of situations, I latch onto the smartest person in the room, and try to fuse into them. Become them.
To share a snippet from my diary:
I sometimes meet people who are so fucking epic that I want to be that person. That is the case with [colleague_name].
Fanboy paragraph: When I met [colleague_name] in [place], everything that left his mind just sounded so smart! He gave a couple of technical talks and shared his opinions in meetings, which showed so much competency. Just raw raw competency. And as if someone couldn’t be more perfect, he is an interpersonal god as well. He is super kind and he makes the funniest jokes all the time.
I found myself very strongly wanting to be like him. And apparently when something like that enters my mind, I’m quite good at actually doing that. I feel like I am a lot like former [colleague_name], at least the way he was projected in my mind. I have an absurd sense of humor now, am better with people, and am also rapidly growing technically to the extent where I can also say the right things all the time in technical context.
I can’t wait…
San Francisco seems like the perfect place to meet ambitious people. People who make me feel dumb. And that’s the best position to be in.
I’m extremely stoked to go to San Francisco.
USA, here I come!
