Life, a Work in Progress
How my birthday triggered an urge to write about randomness, continuous learning and a convoluted career path.
Today I turn 49, yet I’m not an obsolete relic from a distant engineering past, those legendary days when the Internet was a small village of 1000 hosts and the Web hadn’t been invented (back in 1987).
Birthdays have always been for me an occasion to do something special that will mark the date. After more failed attempts than I care to count, I will embark - again - on a journey as an amateur writer. Better late than never, I guess?
Base Principles
What will be different this time?
I will write for you dear reader, striving to keep the quality of my content high
Practice makes perfect, I will post updates weekly
I will use a candid tone and as the title of this blog suggests, I won’t be afraid of baring it all for you
As Anne Lamott puts it in Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, “plot grows out of character”. Sharing my unique circumstances will help you understand why I adopted a certain set of beliefs - and frankly, add a human touch that’s missing from better, smarter, and dryer publications.
I will quote books as personal reading recommendations. My life has been heavily influenced by wonderful people, experiences, and books. As the saying (and HBR sales slogan) goes, “you are what you read”. In full disclosure, I will use Amazon affiliate links - out of curiosity about methods to create passive income streams - for the days when the Twilio stock price will stop defying gravity.
Photo of the Week
Every week I will share a photo that relates to the main topic of the post.
For over 10 years I have been an avid travel photographer, publishing hundreds of pictures I took on Flickr under the Common Creative Attribution license (i.e. free for anyone to use, as long as you kindly mention my screen name - thank you).
I confess that I take pride in seeing my photos on popular Web sites like the Chilean Tourist Office, Lonely Planet, Climbing, USA Today, PopSugar, Televisa, Business Insider, Rethink Tokyo, the Society of Architects of Uruguay, World Atlas, African Review, Canadian Traveller, World Resources Institute, etc. (a narcissistic pursuit consists in Googling my own name to find the latest publications).
Today’s picture was taken one year ago on the Nevado del Tolima volcano, in Colombia, overcoming the last difficulty before reaching the summit. As a sideline, for climate change deniers, feel free to hike to the top of the Nevado de Santa Isabel to witness how rapidly the glaciers of the high Andes are shrinking. A mortifying sight.
Mountaineering photos of alpinists roped up on a forbidding peak, relying on each other to summit and avoid near-certain death, are a well-known trope in teamwork contexts - and motivational posters boasting corny texts.
There’s some truth to it, though:
For weekend climbers (i.e. not elite athletes like Ueli Steck or Anatoli Boukreev, who have a remarkable tendency to die young), success depends on the team’s ability to share the weight of the food and gear to carry up, navigate dangerous and ever-changing terrain, encourage each other when the going gets tough, check each other’s harness to prevent accidents, etc.
Teams are more likely to reach their destination safely with the help of an experienced leader or guide. It takes years of training and practice in increasingly demanding situations to forge an expert mountain guide who will be responsible for the lives of her clients. The same holds true for engineering leaders (minus our impact on the survival rate of our teammates, thankfully).
I have been leading teams of software developers since the mid-’90s. It is time to ponder on what I have learned along the path - and what is required to adapt to an ever-changing world - and thus avoid becoming a quaint archaism like Archie or Veronica.
A Random Walk Through Life
A while ago, during a 1:1, an intern who’s much smarter and wiser than I was at her age, asked me to outline my career plan. What rules did I follow to end up leading several teams at Twilio? Do I hold a secret template for success?
Her question was perplexing. Reminiscing, I had to humbly admit that it’s not superior merit - nor privileges - that got me where I am today, rather an extraordinary chain of fortuitous events:
1956: the Soviet tanks roll into Budapest. My mother takes up arms and is eventually forced to flee Hungary with nothing but the clothes she was wearing when the Revolution got crushed. She ends up in Switzerland where she meets my father, another Hungarian refugee. They speak no French and have no jobs.
1971: I’m born, 49 years ago, a stateless citizen. I grow up in the charming cosmopolitan city of Geneva, taking advantage of the excellent - and free - Swiss education system. I’m a good, dedicated, student but lousy at sports. I delight in writing stories and relish history classes.
1984: I get a Sinclair ZX Spectrum from my parents. I have no idea why they picked that gift, but I’m immediately hooked… by the games! Programming geometric effects in BASIC is tedious. Playing Sabre Wulf is much more fun.
1987: to the great despair of my math teacher (who correctly recognized my lack of affinity with equations of any sort) and my German language teacher (who believed I could become a shining star in humanities ), I decided to study Computer Systems Engineering at the EIG (Geneva Engineering School), widely considered the most demanding institution in the city. The board of examiners is so impressed with my essay that they allow me to skip the math exam. Phew! Did I own a crystal ball revealing a hazy future full of unicorn opportunities? Not at all, I merely wanted a profession I could practice anywhere in the world.
1988: I almost fail my first year at school, saved in extremis by acing the very last numerical analysis exam of the academic calendar. My nights are spent cracking dongle copy protection schemes of DOS programs for fun. I get seriously proficient at debugging assembly language code - and barely avoid getting expelled for intruding into the CERN servers via DECnet (by accident, of course).
1992: I graduate with honors. A few weeks later, my family gets evicted from our house. I must find a job to survive instead of studying for a Ph.D. at the EPFL in Lausanne. I get hired as a C/UNIX application developer by a French business - knowing neither C nor UNIX. I’m assigned to work on a large scale IVR telephony system. The technology is enthralling and I become obsessed with it.
1995: I spot the only magazine ad ever published by British speech recognition startup Vocalis Ltd, send them my CV as part of a batch of 100 applications I mailed worldwide, like so many messages in a bottle thrown to the ocean, and get hired. I emigrate from the mountains of Switzerland to the flatlands of Cambridgeshire. I’m a passable programmer with above-average communication and organizational skills, so I promptly get promoted to a program manager role.
1998: the company sells a gigantic voice-activated system to Telmex in Mexico. The only issue is… we lack 95% of the signaling stack to interface with the carrier’s network. No big deal. I live for months in the labs of Ericsson Mexico, leading a small development team that iteratively writes the integration software. We eventually pass all the acceptance tests. I took zero vacations that year.
1999: Vocalis generously allows me to carry over my 1998 vacations and I pick the least visited Latin American country as my travel destination: Colombia. No risk to bump into foreign tourists in Bogota, with the FARC guerrillas striking a few kilometers from the capital. I fall in love with the country and its people.
2001: the dot-com bubble bursts and leaves me with no client assignment shortly after joining Accenture in London. I discover that the rat race in the miserable Surrey Winter isn’t for me. I long for the sun of Mexico and the excitement of launching a startup. As I hand over my resignation letter, my managing partner lets me know in no uncertain terms that I’m out of my bloody mind to abandon a promising career for the vagaries of startup life in a developing country. I smile - I have always been painfully slow-witted in emotional situations.
2004: I’m the CTO and co-founder of Simitel in Mexico D.F. and my Spanish has improved beyond the bare minimum required to order a tequila and a taxi. The company is growing fast. My team of two dozen talented engineers innovates, developing one of the world’s first software-only, VoIP contact centers. Life is good.
2008: my business has gone bust. I’m left with nothing but a return flight ticket to Europe. Luckily, an ex-colleague puts me in touch with the CEO of Livevox Inc in San Francisco. He offers me to open a software factory in Latin America. I suggest Medellin, Colombia. After an interminable pause on the phone, he accepts. I knew the place well, I had been there - once - in 2006. I had noticed a major advantage though: zero competition for talent from other Bay Area software companies - Americans were too afraid to even step out of the airport!
2014: Livevox Colombia is taking off like a rocket ship. I’m in charge of the Medellin office and the entire core VoIP engineering team. While on a business trip to San Francisco I attend a meetup at Twilio and get one of those fabled “aha moment”: this is the startup I wish I had founded. Never mind, let’s join them - but how? Destiny knocked a few weeks later: a friend had been headhunted by Twilio and jokingly asked if I would be interested in applying instead of him!
2015: I broke the record for the longest screening process at Twilio - one year and countless interviews to get the job. Thanks to the company acquiring the Colombian two-factor authentication startup Authy in Bogota, I join Twilio as Senior Engineering Manager in October 2015. I’m scared, I know nothing about security products.
2017: following Twilio’s IPO in 2016, I get promoted to Senior Director of Engineering, leading R&D for the Account Security business unit. We’ve gone from a hyper-growth unicorn to a hyper-scale public company. What a ride!
This is my career in a nutshell, and it’s all over the place, literally. Reading posts from engineers on Blind, carefully crafting plans to get into FANG companies after leet coding to death, and securing multiple offers to boost their Total Comp negotiating power, I feel my life was an aimless journey through space and time.
What I wasn’t is passive, nor afraid to take risks. I accidentally did something smart: I relentlessly explored the world, exposing myself to fortuitous opportunities that could lead to new paths in my life. My resulting story may be tortuous and sub-optimal, but it also constitutes a life well-lived that won’t cause me to twist with belated regret on my death bed.
A couple of years ago, I was introduced to Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s views in Fooled by Randomness. He claims that chance plays a much greater role in life than we care to acknowledge. I can only agree.
It’s as if we’re all venture capital investors in ourselves and our only currency is time. Early on in our existence, it pays off to embrace as many experiences as possible, spreading our bets. Most will produce unexciting outcomes but a handful will be runaway successes.
It took me 22 years of haphazard evolution to become a “fair” engineering leader. Only since joining Twilio, I realized that I could
Increase the pace at which I iterate and improve, squeezing more evolution cycles in less time.
Develop my self-awareness and become more intentional about the questions I ask and how I answer them.
(How I missed the concept of self-awareness until I turned 38 is totally beyond me!)
If I were more of a deep thinker, I would draft a method to this madness, since there’s incontrovertible evidence that it can work - at least for this non-statistically relevant sample of one named Serge.
Harnessing Randomness
I have mixed feelings about the current craze for self-improvement schemes of all feathers. The array of books rehashing the same data sources and hackneyed concepts that promise to turn you in into a hero of productivity, time-management, leadership, and much more - in a dozen easy-to-read chapters - seems like a symptom of a society in distress.
The world has clearly become much more complex and competitive than it was in the 70s when I was born, at least as seen through the lens of a middle-aged, middle-class man born in the middle of Europe.
It is overwhelming to think about all the mental models and life hacks that one must master in order to achieve that elusive success or happiness that we’re supposed to aspire to.
I have already acknowledged the role of Lady Luck in life. Are we fated to come across random opportunities and squander them or fail to recognize them?
Define your Goals and Principles
While Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill is a cringeworthy read, the author does make a couple of points that are invaluable:
“A burning desire to be and to do is the starting point from which the dreamer must take off”.
“Riches come, if they come at all, in response to definite demands, based upon the application of definite principles, and not by chance or luck”.
Did I just contradict my earlier point on the prevalence of randomness in life? While I don’t subscribe to the thesis that anyone can make money rain solely through auto-suggestion (I wish! I would be meditating more often if it were the case), building, and consistently applying calibrated mental models in the service of well defined personal goals is an essential prerequisite to detect those events that present the highest breakthrough potential.
Let me mention a few practical examples below:
I realized fairly late that working for a Silicon Valley company was the software engineering equivalent of playing in the Premier League. Always striving to do my best and seeking to work with those who were the leaders in my industry made my career gravitate naturally toward the Bay Area.
Twilio was on the edge of my radar screen since Jeff founded the company in 2008. Opening up telecom networks via a programmable platform designed for developers, allowing them to build innovative applications in a fraction of the time, was a brilliant concept. I wanted to be part of that quest - and when I saw that meetup announcement while I was in SF, I jumped on the occasion.
Serendipity can be manufactured. If you ardently desire something, you tune your mind to identify any minor piece of information that relates to it, then harness it and imperceptibly get closer to your goal.
Focus on your Strengths
The next question is maybe the most critical for your success: should you work on your weaknesses or develop your strengths? StrengthsFinder 2.0 is adamant that you must do the latter: doubling down on your strengths is a much more valuable use of your time.
The results of my StrengthsFinder assessment categorize me as
Analytical
Input
Learner
Activator
Deliberative
When I perform an activity that aligns closely with my strengths, I feel energized, ready to change the world. My impact is multiplied.
Knowing your strengths is critical when evaluating career options. For instance, I could never be a social worker, despite admiring the men and women who work in that field.
Back in 2009 when my mother passed away, I felt the urge to inject some purpose in my life. I collaborated with an association in Bogota that helps Colombian kids in difficult situations. Unfortunately, this was an unfulfilling experience due to the lack of alignment with my strengths and interests. I remained a financial sponsor for a long time, however.
What is almost as important as the air I breathe is the ability to learn something new every day. I often have to time-box my investigations into new technologies as I’m only too happy to rat hole for days, wading into the intricacies of a topic that intrigues me.
Nurture your Social Network
A captivating exercise we did at work a few weeks ago was to map the StrengthsFinder results of our entire business unit in a Google sheet. We realized that we were overweight in the Strategic Strengths category and worryingly underweight in leaders who excel at Relationship Building.
At work you can fix this by hiring talent that fills the gaps in your strengths map - but what do you as an individual? You need to surround yourself with people who add value to your life, are supportive of your personal development, and provide an original perspective - essentially, build a network of mentors.
Did you notice how people played such a crucial role at critical junctures in my career? Livevox and Twilio having vacancies for someone with my background when I needed it the most may be related to my good fortune but connecting with these opportunities was only made possible by having an entourage of well-wishing people.
Make Wise Bets
As you grow old, you begin to notice patterns in life. There’s an interesting parallel between humans and the universe: we’re born in a burst of energy, entropy rules our youth as we expand in all directions, then order settles in and finally, the cold mantle of death covers us.
The corollary to this metaphor is that there are privileged age ranges to undertake specific activities and you must invest your time strategically because you only get one shot at this (unless you are Harry August, then you get fifteen shots):
Want to become an elite mountaineer? (and achieve fame dying young?) You ought to start scaling peaks at 8, not 38 as I did when I discovered that I was genetically endowed with an ability to sustain heavy efforts at high altitude.
Keen to hit the reset button and jettison that unsatisfying yet promising career in a crowded, rainy, European capital, to follow the mermaid songs under the blue sky of Latin America? Better do this before you have a family that relies on your income for sustenance!
Jeff Bezos talks about one-way and two-way doors, and as you age, you will naturally be inclined to favor the latter, because going through the former and losing everything becomes unacceptable - you simply have no energy or time left to bounce back. Age begets stability (and death is the ultimate form of stability).
A one-way door is a decision that is irreversible. Imagine an opportunity to drop your corporate job, invest all your savings in a startup, and go abroad to become the next unicorn billionaire? This decision is both irreversible and consequential: you must approach it with care. Good decision making is a skill that you should learn early. I recently enrolled in the Decision by Design course taught by Shane Parrish of Farnam Street fame and wish I had done this earlier… 30 years earlier to be precise.
Good financial discipline implies that you must always evaluate your risk/reward ratio - otherwise, you’re gambling, not investing. What the insightful book Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street teaches us is that you must also consider the unlikely odds of a Black Swan event that will cause an irreparable loss. This is a consequence of living in a random world. (a quick parenthesis here: COVID isn’t a Black Swan event, just watch this TED talk of Bill Gates back in 2015)
Would you feel comfortable with the risk of falling into an icy crevasse in the farthest reaches of the Himalayas in order to make the first ascent of an unnamed mountain? Would you fancy your chances playing with stock market options at home during a pandemic outbreak, and facing unlimited losses - if you were only a few years from retirement?
When investing your time, carefully weigh your downside (catastrophic risk) and upside (opportunity/cost), before making a decision.
In retrospect, I see my 8 years spent in Mexico ceaselessly toiling on a tech startup that was ahead of its time as a poor investment of an invaluable resource - my time - stemming from inadequate decision-making skills that yielded little progress career-wise - but enormous life satisfaction. It’s all about tradeoffs in the end.
And this, dear reader, brings me to the conclusion of this first post. My writing took a life of its own and the final text is not what I expected. I will experiment with content that is more closely related to engineering leadership next week. I’ll also listen to your feedback on whether or not you liked this post.
So,
Why am I not (yet) an obsolete relic of a bygone era of VAX VMS computers? Because I never stopped learning, evolving, taking risks, and capturing opportunities that a random world generously created.
I don’t claim to be a role model - feel free to pick and apply the insights that most closely relate to your own unique situation.