The professional contrarian

My first gig was at a local agency close to my university. I was grateful for the opportunity (still am) to learn by doing. I made a bunch of stuff and can’t believe I got paid for it. It surprised me and my family. But the nature of my work was obvious: advertising. The lack of intrinsic value of the stuff I produce stuck with me ever since. It might be cool but a website is a website. You can’t eat it. It won’t keep you warm at night. So I get annoyed when someone brags about their SaaS business or latest app side project.

When I joined Opendoor in 2016. I knew nothing about real estate, let alone American real estate, nor the tech industry. I knew Wordpress, CSS and had a vague sense of taste. That’s all I had to offer professionally. After a few months, the concept of buying and selling homes online seemed odd and likely only enticing to people like me with no social skills willing to pay to avoid having to talk to sales people. Years passed, obstacles, funding rounds, layoffs, customer counts kept ticking up. I didn’t change my mind. The company IPOed but is not exactly thriving. People do want a digital home buying and selling experience. The costs are too high and it’s still a mess. The narrative fight is a typical one for a category disruptor - and of very little interest to me. Perhaps because my wife handled ALL the paperwork of our home purchase.

My first year in the US was also Trump’s first election. Since then, lucky bastard cruised through the immigration process. Minor bumps occurred. Not surprisingly, a French passport helps. I have been in disagreement with most national political news since landing. I’m not a culture fit in the political sense of the term. Yet I’m still here and more hopeful than ever. That has more to do with my family than politics. America is where that happened. The melting pot is still paying off dividends. Maybe someday I’ll cast my vote.

I worked at GitHub because the naive picture I had of the company mission seemed virtuous: The home of open source! I knew they had to pay the server bills somehow but hoped to not be too disappointed. I had a good time. I’m grateful for the opportunity of a few years inside the belly of the beast. The team is world class, leadership oozes integrity. The benefits were also quite amazing. I enjoyed 2 -20 weeks long- paid parental leaves. How much can I complain? The shift toward enterprise and AI is what ultimately convinced me to move on from big tech. A polite way to say that overhead and bullshit killed my vibe. I now work at Expo, a (if not The) react native framework company. I don’t particularly care about apps, I’m a web guy. I don’t know much about react and thanks to AI will never need to properly learn it. I don’t disagree with the current mission, although I don’t have philosophical sympathy for it. I think generally the world needs less tech. I don’t buy the future of personal software, nor humans not writing code as a good idea. As long as I’m not asked to advocate for something I don’t believe in, the craft, the crew and the paycheck will keeps me there. Hopefully open source will keep Expo grounded. I also hope that in the long term, the end of google and Apple monopolies will open up a more pluralistic future for software in which Expo will have a role to play.

However much I disagreed with my employers, I always found something to agree with in my managers and teammates. Looking back at my short career, I’ve met mostly kind, reasonably self interested, well intentioned people. I have the same experience of Americans. Which leaves me cynical when considering the world at large.

I’m also a dumb reactionary contrarian. We have a funny term in French: un con qui dit non. I don’t even agree with most of my wife’s thoughts. A fact that is comically obvious to one reading our blogs. That might just be a fact of marriage. Most of the time I hate myself for hating everything. Yet I’m content with how far I’ve gone. Honesty and compromise are not mutually exclusive. That is hard to swallow. But once again, it is what it is.