Journal: This Is Not Your Last Job

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+---
+title: This Is Not Your Last Job
+subtitle: Unless you’re retired, and maybe not even then.
+date: 2025-01-03T21:17:00-0700
+
+summary: >
+    Years ago, a colleague asked me why I cared about Rust when we would never use it. Part of the answer: that was not my last job.
+
+tags:
+    - career development
+
+qualifiers:
+    audience: |
+        Despite the programming languages in the opening, this applies outside tech and across industries. It is about careers, not about computers.
+
+---
+
+Many years ago, when I was working at [Olo](https://www.olo.com), a colleague asked me, “Why are you interested in Rust? It’s not like we’re going to use that here!” Olo was and is a [<span class="all-smcp">.NET</span>](https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/) shop, and my enthusiasm for Rust seemed odd to a *lot* of my colleagues at Olo, especially in the 2016–2018 era when Rust was still very new and very much *not* popular.[^1] From that perspective, I can understand why my colleague was a bit confused by my enthusiasm for a technology that looked wholly unrelated to any part of the company’s tech stack—least of all my role as a front-end web engineer.
+
+I don’t actually recall what I said to that colleague all those years ago, but obviously the question itself made an impression: I still think of it from time to time. Here’s how I would answer it now, in two parts, the less important part first:
+
+First, this is not my last technology. I have been in this industry some 15 years, and over that time I have *already* seen technologies go from “extremely hot” to “fairly staid”—not that Java or Ruby is going anywhere, but do I expect most of the interesting jobs another 20 years from *now* to be using either? Probably not, honestly. I started my career working with Fortran and C and <span class="all-smcp">PHP</span>, and while none of those three are going anywhere, and indeed while there will be good pay in working on code written in them for a long time, they are not (I think and hope!) the *future* of software development.
+
+What is more, I have learned about myself over the years that I like being a relatively early adopter of good new technology and—where possible—helping it go mainstream. Not bleeding-edge early, not nothing-works-until-you-implement-it-yourself early. More like Rust 1.0 early: late enough that there are a lot of things that work, but early enough that I can contribute meaningfully in some way, often by communicating effectively about it. (Thus: my recent work helping a bit here and there with telling the world about [Jujutsu](https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj).)
+
+JavaScript—and then TypeScript—have been my first language from a pays-the-bills point-of-view since 2014 or so. I have written tiny bits of C♯ at Olo and Java at LinkedIn,[^2] and have managed to work directly on Rust projects here and there. But I do not expect TypeScript to be the primary language I use for the rest of my career!
+
+So, again: this—whether that *this* is JavaScript/TypeScript or C♯ or whatever else—is not my last technology. 
+
+Second, though, and by far the more important: *this* is not my last job—wherever I am working at any given moment, right up through retirement. I mean that in two ways. First of all: I expect to have several more employers between today and the end of my career. When I had that conversation back at Olo, I was not yet actively looking anywhere else, but I fully expected I would move on at *some* point. Likewise, I did not begin planning to leave LinkedIn until mid-to-late 2023 (not many months before I *did* in fact leave).
+
+I would *love* to find the kind of place I can stay for the rest of my career, but to date nowhere has come close. (I hoped LinkedIn would be a 5–7 year run, and I made it *almost* to the 5-year mark!) Any given employer would have to be extremely special to be a truly long-haul fit for me.
+
+<aside>
+
+Speaking of which: I am still on the market, and maybe you *are* that very special employer? I’d love to hear from you if  [what I’m hoping to do](https://v5.chriskrycho.com/journal/next/role/) resonates with you.
+
+(No, I did not write this whole post for the sake of this aside, but given I’m still looking, it would be foolish of me *not* to mention it—especially since a few folks noted recently that they did not realize I was still looking!)
+
+</aside>
+
+There is another way, though, in which *this is not my last job*, whomever my employer may be. I am not the kind of person who can just hit his stride at 35 and settle in to do that for the rest of his life with little change. (Sometimes I am tempted to envy people who *can* do that.) I am always looking for new ways to stretch and grow. So even if I find that very special employer where I *can* continue to grow in mutually beneficial ways for the rest of my career, my role there will undoubtedly change over time.
+
+Put more directly: Someday I *will* find my last employer—but I fully expect I will have *several* jobs with that employer in terms of the work I do.
+
+So why did I want to learn Rust back then? Why did I spend a decent chunk of late 2023  and early 2024 learning a bit about how to build programming languages? Why do I keep studying how other fields interact with or inform this one? Well, for many reasons, including the sheer love of learning—but also, in part, because *this is not my last job*.
+
+[^1]:	That enthusiasm was also, and remained, a point of affectionate bemusement for my colleagues throughout my tenure at LinkedIn, too. Not long before I left, a colleague joked, and not for the first time, “Just find someone who looks at you the way Chris looks at Rust.”
+
+[^2]:	Despite having done my best to avoid both!