Layer, Build and Risk: Why I turned down a million dollar job to code and do Lambda School

Not sure if this is the right place to share but I wrote this originally as an email to myself a while back on why to learn to code and thought to share it with the community for feedback, tips on the learning journey and perhaps it can help someone still considering learning development think through the decision.

I have this habit of writing emails to myself to structure my thinking. This is one of those emails with some adjustments for public sharing.

Let me be honest right off the bat; this won’t be one of those “coding rules, anyone who doesn’t code shouldn’t be listened to” cult pieces. Quite the contrary.

There is something deeply satisfying about creating things that solve a problem -any problem- in a better way. I mean there’s something deeply satisfying about creating things period. I don’t know exactly what it is -and we can argue forever about the existential anxiety roots of craving problem solving as a form of meaning for life- but it’s definitely there. I personally find building technology that simplifies complex problems or streamlines unnecessarily convoluted processes to be the most satisfying flavor of that.

The backstory

I started out my career on the “business” side of things on the other side of the world (America being “this side”). Landed a couple of decent -and excruciatingly boring- corporate jobs at Fortune 500 companies’ local offices for a couple of years before I quit without a plan. I had to. If I had stayed one more day I would have walked into the office and started banging my head against a wall screaming “None of us has a real job” on repeat. I kept applying to jobs I thought at the time would be intellectually challenging and that can be a gateway to get me into the “technology space” in America (more on why later). By some whiff of good luck I got into management consulting at its most sought after name; McKinsey. A couple of years later I transferred to their New York office, started a full-time MBA at Columbia and was well on my way to do what I wanted to do. A few years after that I had founded a -failed- startup, advised on some very interesting technology & strategy topics (when I went back to McKinsey) and worked at a leadership role at a dream company of mine; Amazon. I was super lucky.

Until October 2019 I had a great job at Amazon. I led a big team doing product management, marketplace growth & data science for one of the e-commerce businesses. It had been 3 years in that role during which the business grew ~800% into multi-billion dollars of revenue which was super exciting. I loved my team, my boss and the company culture. We built things many people wanted. In short, many real -not vanity- metrics were checked for me. In addition, my Amazon stock compensation had skyrocketed in value so I was making great money.

Ironically, I started getting the “walk in and bang my head against the wall” urge again. This time I knew what the issue was though so I made a plan. In fact I had known one of the issues for quite a long time but the time to act on it hadn’t come -for many personal reasons- until now.

While I was finalizing that plan -it involved quitting the large corporate world at least for a while- a headhunter reached out about a very senior role at a Fortune 100. After some back and forth, I agreed to talk because “there’s nothing to lose and it would be good networking anyway”. They quickly made me an offer. Self delusion kicked in.

The three delusion flavors of that week were: 1. “You can’t pass on landing a C-level job at a Fortune 100 in your damn 30s! Remember where you started!” 2. “You can still build stuff. After all they are a technology company -albeit old school- and you’ll lead a turn-around there” and the world champion of delusions: 3. “I’ll do this for a couple of years then I can do my plan and take all the risk I want”.

Long story short, I took the offer and put my plan on hold.

This job was very different from my previous jobs which have all been in either tech (Amazon & the startup I founded and ran for a few years out of New York) or management consulting (McKinsey). It was much more “cushy”, focused a lot more on corporate politics and was not as intellectually challenging. My compensation would have added up to more than $1 Million per year, I was leading a large organization with hundreds of people, etc. It checked a lot of “vanity metrics”. None of that matters and never should. Misery often comes out of comfort without purpose.

8 weeks into this new cushy job I quit (most of the comp is in equity that vests over time so I didn’t make much of those big bucks 🤷🏻‍♂️) to go back to what I had originally intended to do. It sounds crazy because of the opportunity cost but that is actually sort of the point.

The why: Florence

I immigrated to the US 10 years ago because I wanted to be part of building technology that solves problems and -as naive or cliche as this sounds I don’t care- builds the future. There are many many other reasons to love America but “technology & entrepreneurship paradise” was the main one for me. I moved my entire life for that despite having a flourishing career that would have been even much more financially lucrative -if you think short to medium term- elsewhere (for starters I would have paid literally zero taxes the last 10 years while making very similar money 😂). For someone who did not grow up rich by any stretch of the word this was not an easy string of decisions.

Here’s how I found myself describing it to a close friend who’s in very similar shoes a while back: “I’m not entirely sure why but I feel like we have a role in Florence during the renaissance. It’s almost impossible to put a price on that”

Back to that “plan” that this post is all about. As I sat down to think about what I want to do towards the end of my time at Amazon I followed a simple framework:

1. What type of work and with who makes me feel like I’m not working when I’m working? (It's never 100% obviously but what & with who do I feel that enough?)
2. How can I participate in “Florence” much better than I am now?
3. What will I regret (work-wise) when I’m 80?
4. What makes me most miserable (at work)?

I had known for a long time that if I want to truly build things that make a dent in some problems (i.e. #2 on the list above) I need to learn how to code properly. After all software is -truly- eating the world. But it quickly hit me how interconnected the answers to all 4 questions are. Layering skills that help you become a builder of things and taking the risks that come with that in the process are (or lack thereof) the answer to all 4 questions.

A couple of years ago I watched Marc Andreessen talk about the best career advice he heard. He heard it from the creator of Dilbert; Scott Adams (who wrote it here). Layering and combining skills. I can’t overstate how much I think this is spot on. If you’re a business person who knows data science you can accomplish 10x more than any other business person. If you’re an engineer who understands business & customers you can be 10x more effective than any other engineer. Etc.

I layered quite a bit of “business” skills over the years. Yet all these things fall under what I call the Business Generalist umbrella (I wrote about this here). I believe that in order to make meaningful contributions to solving hard problems in technology you need some level of participation in computer science (actually it could be participation in any kind of physics and engineering). Being able to build (hence coding) yourself not just manage others to do so vastly expands your ability to experiment, spot good ideas, develop stronger intuition and most importantly it makes you have skin in the game (see Nassim Taleb).

I dabble in coding (although I am far from a professional developer) and when I do -for work or fun- it doesn’t feel like work most of the time. It feels like a hobby. Like you’re actually rolling up your sleeves and making the idea in your head. I also never felt like I’m working while I worked on small teams with people I really like that are solving something with a missionary rather than a mercenary mindset. It was definitely the case when I started my own company where a team of 5 survived for 2 years on just $200K of funding because we all were focused on building. But I’ve had this experience in other situations too.

The things I’d regret the most (work-wise) when I’m 80 are risks I did not take. And as -Jeff Bezos puts it- minimizing regret is something I believe many of us should aim for. The only real risk is taking no risks. Failure isn’t the worst outcome. Mediocrity is.

What’s next

I just got into Lambda School and I haven’t been this excited about something in a long time. I chose Lambda over other programs including a Masters in CS for many reasons but the main one was simply that they have what I believe to be the best approach.

Lambda's mastery-based model (spend hundreds and hundreds of hours writing code) + a foundation in computer science theory/problem solving (you don’t want to be the developer who didn’t quite understand algorithms) + finally an alignment of incentives that is baked into the school’s model all come together to be very powerful. Compared not only to other “bootcamps” but also to more traditional university programs.

I’ll be writing a separate post on the quest for how to study CS properly and why I think Lambda is the best option.

I’m going full in. I’m starting Lambda full-time to build CS skills, I’m talking with a few small teams about ideas and I am starting to put all what I’ve learned about business skills into online courses/newsletter. My first goals are finishing Lambda School with a skillset that enables me to build products and to build a side part-time profitable business that enables me to have the peace of mind to continue experimenting with big ideas.

I tweet @byadham . You can follow me there as I document what I learned from my previous journey and what I’m learning from what I’m doing now.

There’s an Arabic saying attributed to Khalil Gibran; the brilliant author of The Prophet that roughly translates to: “For they should learn that the rich man is not who owns more but who needs less”.

Cheers