How Prioritizing Mental Wellness Influenced My Career Path

hey kyle how are you today i'm good how are you thank you i'm doing good i really appreciate what you do for us you know we're a young non-profit and you have been so generous with your time and your skills and i really appreciate all your help i also know that you have this you know you've been at google for a while and you've gone from different paths right software engineer manager individual contributor and you know you've been in in us then you went to canada you've had a lot of different roles in your life you want to tell me a little bit about why you move from one place to the other Starting out as a software engineer yeah yeah so you're right i started off um out of college as a software engineer um i just thought my career path was i'm gonna be a coder my entire life and i'll just you know go up a ladder you know whatever that meant but i wasn't thinking too much about it um and then after about five years in um i started to realize that i was i was getting a little bit um bored or just not learning you know that i was just doing a lot of the same stuff over and over um and at that time it happened to be a good time in my team that we were expanding and needed a manager to join um so i volunteered i said yeah hey can i try to be a manager yeah and uh and i did and that worked out really well so i was i was excited and interested in doing that yeah and then yeah as you're saying also i was getting a little bit bored in my position as a manager and then there was an opportunity to move to toronto to open up a new office um so i did that and that was a lot of fun um now yeah eventually decided management was i've had enough of that and now i've come back to being a software engineer back to being an individual contributor so i mean everybody aspires to be a manager right you look forward to doing the role that you report to and you wanted to step i would say uh step down to become an individual contributor and what was the reason for that Being a manager yeah um it's kind of like what i was saying before in that um as an engineer i kind of got bored or i wasn't learning as a manager i kind of got to the same point after being a manager for about 10 years that was one part of it of just like you know i'm starting to get interested again i want to go back and learn different technologies but then there was also like the the anxiety about it um being a manager is hard um it's uh difficult when working with you know real humans going through situations in their life um trying to help the people that are really good be as best as they can but the really hard part for me was always with poor performers you know trying to help people that aren't doing well i'm giving them feedback helping them out and it i would just internalize a lot of it and think that it's like this is my fault what am i going to do tomorrow i'm going to dread tomorrow because i know i'm going to have to talk with this person and it's just going to be a difficult conversation and i just couldn't take it anymore yeah the performance reviews are particularly bad not only for uh employees but also for managers i wish i had a manager like you because [Laughter] thank you my i actually had a lot of good managers but one was a particularly bad manager and i think you would need to remember the bad guys mostly yeah and i'm sure plenty of people along the way also thought that i was a bad manager you know i had i had my things i was good at and i had my things that i wasn't so good at uh you know recognizing that's part of part of everybody yeah yeah so i think i guess using the mental health aspect of it made you you know find more happiness over um a title Optimizing for happiness yeah exactly um you know generally i've been thinking about my life and my career as optimizing for happiness on a day-to-day um day-to-day career day-to-day responsibilities i guess my duties yeah i know plenty of people also friends that were very like career driven to go up and you know focusing on titles um want to make a lot of money and that's great and everything um but i was never like that i've i've never really been in that for the money um by all means i'm doing fine um but i never you know i never optimized never tried to make my career path um go up as fast as possible yeah i guess the style yeah i know that's fantastic to hear that you chose happiness over you know just the titles for that's that's such a great story and thank you again so much for being on our platform i'm sure there'll be a lot of people who learn from your journey thanks kyle great yeah thank you [Music]