The Thing Itself

It's 4 AM and I managed to sleep a few hours. My ride is about to get here, I need to go downstairs. The ride to the airport takes about 15 minutes, this driver is going fast, a little too fast for my liking. Once at the airport, I quickly go through security and then find an empty seat at the lounge near my gate. I am on my way to Chicago, we have an onsite from work, and I am excited to meet the people who I work with in person. We've done these onsites before, but it's been a few years since the last one and I haven't met half of my team in person yet.

Three days of working in the same room with people I usually see as small rectangles on a screen. We had lunch at a place near the office where everyone ordered too much food and nobody cared. After the work sessions, some of us went downtown, and we talked about things that had nothing to do with code or deadlines. I learned more about my coworkers in two hours than I had in a year of standups.

On the last day we talked about projects for the rest of the year. At some point the conversation turned technical, the kind of back and forth about how something works and how to make it better that I never get tired of. Someone drew boxes on a whiteboard and we argued about the right way to do something that probably doesn't matter to anyone outside that room. Architecture decisions, tradeoffs, what to build next. I left with a few pages of notes and the kind of energy I haven't felt at work in a while.

I thought about that energy the whole walk back to the hotel. Not the specifics of what we discussed, but what it revealed about the kind of work that still gets me going after twenty-five years.

Nobody in that room was talking about strategy decks or quarterly OKRs. We were talking about the thing itself. That is the work I love. It always has been.

I've thought about the management path many times over the years. Every time, I arrive at the same answer.

I like the building part.

Not the meetings about the building. Not the planning of the building. Not the alignment of stakeholders around the prioritization of the building. The building.

There's a version of my career where I took the management track ten or fifteen years ago. I'd probably earn more. I'd have a more impressive title. But I also know what would have happened to the hours between 9 PM and midnight, the hours I've spent for years working on my own projects. Management is the kind of work that doesn't clock out when you close your laptop. The mental overhead of navigating team dynamics, politics, performance reviews, it follows you home. And those evening hours are the hours that matter most to what I'm trying to do now.

In tech, staying as an individual contributor past a certain age gets treated like a lack of ambition. Like you topped out. Like you weren't good enough for the "real" leadership work. I used to feel defensive about it. I don't anymore. Building things is the work. It always has been for me. The tool I built at work last week and the scripts I wrote on a factory floor in Minnesota twenty-five years ago are the same instinct. Give me a problem and let me build something that solves it.

What I've come to understand is that this instinct, the one that kept me on the builder's track at work, is the same one pushing me to build my way out. I don't want to manage a team at my job, and I don't want to build a company that requires me to manage a team outside of it. I want to write code. I want to ship things. I want to solve problems with my hands on the keyboard, not on an org chart.

That's what PuraLetra is. A tool I built on evenings and weekends because the reading app I used for years shut down and nothing replaced it. Nobody assigned it. Nobody scheduled a planning meeting. I opened my editor and started building, the same way I've always worked best. The skill is the same whether I'm solving a problem at work or solving one on my own. What I'm trying to change is the context.

The onsite reminded me of something I forget when I'm deep in the routine of remote work. I like my coworkers. The job isn't bad. I'm not running from something broken. I'm building toward something I want more. And the fact that I've spent twenty-five years staying close to the craft, sharpening the exact skill set that lets me build alone, without investors, without a team, without permission, that doesn't feel like a career that stalled. It feels like preparation I didn't know I was doing.

My wife flew to Chicago on Friday and we spent the weekend there. On Sunday evening we flew to New York to visit our kids. On the flight, half asleep with my laptop open, I started sketching out a feature I want to add to PuraLetra. Twenty-five years of staying on the builder's track, and the instinct is the same whether I'm at a whiteboard with my team or in seat 14C with my wife asleep next to me.

This is part of Building My Way Out, a weekly series about one engineer's attempt to build a life beyond employment. New essays every Friday. If you're not subscribed, you can sign up here.