It's Never That Important

For the majority of my life, I would consider myself to be an underachiever. I never tried in school, I didn’t do extracurriculars, I didn’t have a lot of friends… The only thing that I ever excelled in was video games. My first job was in Runescape where I ran a woodcutting business through the runescape forums where I was essentially a broker for primarily yew & willow logs. I had over 10 employees and we moved tens of thousands of logs every week. I wonder if they knew that their boss was a 9 year old, this was before voice chat after all.

My biggest accomplishment in video games was when I led a group of 25 raiders to be one of the first groups in the world to defeat the Trial of the Crusade in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. Unfortunately it didn’t surmount to much as it was on the Public Test Realm which resets after every testing session. I still have those screenshots somewhere and I’ll never forget the pride that I had in that moment.

I wouldn’t feel that level of pride again until I went to a coding bootcamp, DevMountain, and landed my first job as a software engineer. I will never forget the sounds of my parents screaming in excitement when I called them to inform them that I was offered a role. In my younger days I had thought about working with computers but for some reason, likely teenage rebellion against my parents who told me I should work with computers, I ended up going & subsequently flunking, out of community college for finance. Once I found out how much I loved the problem solving & creative aspects of engineering, I had realized that this was what I was truly built to do: solve hard problems with smart people.

I’ve been an engineer for coming on 8 years now but it’s only been recently that I’ve felt that I’ve understood what my strengths are and how to effectively apply them. If there is one strength that I hold above all others, it’d be the unrelenting desire to help others. I went a lot of my life as an underachiever where I didn’t feel like I had much to offer others (although in retrospect I did but low confidence does that to you) so when I found a career that offered me unlimited opportunities to help others, I got hooked.

I have never been the type of person to just sit around and wait for things to come their way. I learned early on in my career that if you feel strongly enough about something and you can clearly communicate why it’s important and how it can help others, you will most likely get to work on that thing. As such, I will always think of how to make something better and then try to work on that thing. This has served me very well in my career as I was able to take on projects & responsibilities early on and learn extremely valuable skills that wouldn’t have been possible had I not stood up for what I thought was important. I was really only limited by the space I was working in & how much support I could get from others.

Two years ago, I landed a job at Apollo.io, as a senior frontend growth engineer. I didn’t really know what a growth engineer was, I had only ran a couple of A/B tests and didn’t really understand the sales space. I did know that I was ready to get out of the real estate tech space and jump into a new field that has more opportunities, sales was the one. Apollo is such an incredibly complex piece of software that has so many things going on… I love it. There is no lack of things to improve and no lack of people who want to improve things. The amount of growth that I have gone through at Apollo has not only made be a better engineer but a better person, I am so happy to be here.

In fact, I was so happy to be at Apollo that I just couldn’t stop working. There were so many opportunities for me to help others that I couldn’t stop. Whether it was helping lead a typescript migration, making CI improvements, leading projects, mentoring others, or any of the million things that an engineer does, I wanted to do it all. I built up a name for myself at Apollo as someone who was always willing to help and I was, and still am, truly proud to wear that badge. I was known as the guy that you could go to to get a reply at all hours (we are a global company), get a quick review, hop on a call at any time, or even get help actually coding on a project with.

In my mind, I was happy to help people as any time I was able to help someone solve a problem and that feeling truly became an addiction. My therapist and I determined that this stemmed from myself not feeling like I had anything to offer when I was younger, makes sense. I was not capable of seeing that by giving my all to everyone else, I had nothing to give myself.

I started to feel the effects of burnout last November. My body was breaking down but I didn’t understand why. At work I was on top of the world, or at least I felt like I was. Because I was so addicted to the feeling of helping others, I wasn’t being truthful with people about how I felt but that’s probably because I didn’t even understand how I was feeling. This is the first time in my life where I was experiencing burnout, I didn’t know how to navigate it.

Over the next 5 months, my health continued to get worse. I was the heaviest I’ve been in my life, averaging less than 2,000 steps a day, going on 4 months without more than 4 hours of sleep, and my stomach was in a wreck. My mental health was also starting to take a toll, my wife once said that she didn’t even recognize who I was because of mood swings. That was a real eye opener for me and I knew that I needed to start changing things.

All of this came to a crash when I went through some serious bladder pains. I went to my doctor and she told me that there is a chance that I may have prostate cancer. There is nothing more that will snap you back into reality than your doctor telling you you may have cancer. Over the next week I went through series of tests to try to find out what was wrong meanwhile trying to console my family through a major health scare. I couldn’t help anyone and I was in shambles.

All of my tests came back negative for prostate cancer but instead my body had became so inflamed from stress that it presented itself as cancer. Imagine being so stressed out that your body starts having the same symptoms as PROSTATE CANCER, that was the true wake up call that I needed. The next day I talked to my manager and told him I needed to take time off. I didn’t know how long or what I would do but I knew that I had to make changes right then. I then went to my teammates and told them and everyone offered my open arms and support.

Over the next three months, I wouldn’t think about code. I didn’t think about Apollo. I didn’t think about experiments. I didn’t think about unit tests. I didn’t think about CI. I thought about building a sauna. Software engineering often lacks the physical tangibility that can be so rewarding. Yes I am proud of the incredible software that I have built but the feeling of standing on the roof of the sauna that I built with my own hands… Indescribable.

My wife and I went really hard on the sauna for about two months. I had a goal that it would be done by the time I went back to work and thus I spent all of my time on it. I consider myself quite handy but I was learning a lot of things for the first time. Honestly the hardest part was just leveling out the ground just to get the foundation leveled, how prophetic is that? We messed up a lot, spent more than we thought we would, and everything took longer than we thought just as all home improvement projects do. We were having a blast doing it and I actually thought about my future career shift into contracting, maybe one day.

About 3 weeks before I was set to go back to work, we were feeling behind. I asked one of our best friends, who is a contractor, to come over and give us advice. He flat out told me “Peter, you are fooling yourself if you think you are going to finish this project in three weeks. You’re gonna take shortcuts that you regret and end up with something you aren’t proud of”. We took a two week break starting the next day. The sauna still isn’t finished but that’s okay, we are putting a lot of detail and love into this project and we’re okay with it taking longer.

During that two week break, I started thinking about going back to work. I was wondering what my team was doing, what was Apollo up to and ultimately how I was going to assimilate back into work with this new perspective on life. I had recovered from my illnesses and finally understood what it meant to not live to work. I reached out to a couple coworkers, Julius and Ryan, and they told me what happened during the past three months.

First off, the project that contributed the most to my burnout ended up working out fine. Two of my teammates ended up carrying the torch and making better decisions than I would have made. They became owners of this space and ultimately it was a huge factor in Ryan being promoted to a Senior Backend Engineer. They simplified the architecture, led the company rollout, and trained the company on how to use this new tool that we are now using every day. Had I been there, I don’t think they would have had the opportunity to learn this themselves.

Secondly, the month after I left it was wild. I had taken on so many responsibilities that I primarily done through off channels & DMs that when I wasn’t there to answer, they naturally went to my team for questions. They told me that the first month of oncall was a wild ride and it took a lot of effort to get everything in order again. I am so regretful that my team had to go through that but they understood the amount of self-imposed weight that I had for myself. All of the engineers on my team banded together to improve the on call process in order to prevent this from happening in the future. To this day they will call out anyone who tags me directly in a private channel and I’m so grateful for that.

Lastly, they all felt like they had leveled up as engineers because they were given the opportunity to grow. I felt like I had to do it all in order to shield my teammates but it turns out by shielding them, I was stifling their growth. Since I have been back at work, I can absolutely attest that all of the engineers on my team are better engineers and as such, I don’t feel like I even have the opportunity to get into the same place I once was. My team has learned to identify my Pete-ism’s and they actively prevent me from overworking and they are NOT afraid to call me out.

After that conversation with Julius, I knew that I was ready to come back to work and more specifically I was ready to work with my team. I had a support structure that knew what I had went through and was going to help me navigate this new perspective on life and work.

It’s been about 5 months since I came back to work and I am having a blast. As I has predicted, I haven’t had the opportunity to overwork myself because of the support from my team. That isn’t for lack of trying: I tried to pick up a ticket on my first week back and my manager said I wasn’t ready. I have been able to sit back and work on projects that my teammates are leading and watching them shine. I’ve also been able to find initiatives that I’m interested in and work with my manager and organization to find owners on those initiatives, delegation really works!

I just turned 31 in August and my friend asked me “So Pete, how was 30?” and he knows what I went through so we had a true belly laugh. After finally being able to breathe again, I told him that even though the journey was rough, I learned a valuable lesson: It’s never that important.