"What is the PLAN???"

When I was younger, starting out in the tech industry, I was so bored in my comfortable and unglamorous job at a big travel website company. In retrospect, I was very lucky to get that job. It helped me survive from 2008 - 2011, and gave me a foothold on my resume to go on to bigger and better things.

In college I got into an internship but I had turned down the full-time offer I got from the bank I interned at. Then I floundered around for a while, working odd jobs and trying to find a living situation that I could cope with. Living with my family was not working out, but I also couldn't exactly afford to live on my own.

My younger self was full of ambition and passion but lacked direction. I wanted to work in an internet company. I wanted to do something cool like building interactive websites. I had done a lot of programming and computer science theory in school, but we didn't really learn much about the web in college.. this was still considered the "bleeding edge" of technological innovation at the time. Outside of work, I was trying to read literature and philosophy. I moved back to my college hometown and lived with a friend from my CS program. But mostly this was an attempt to cling to my life as a college student. Most of my friends were a year behind me, so they were still finishing up their degrees. On our college campus, my life made sense. Even though I had graduated, I told myself I was "a student of the world" and even planned to audit some philosophy courses (which I never did).

This is what we would call an "identity crisis." I was trying to relive my misspent college years. Inertia wanted me to accept a job as a Java programmer at a bank, then buy a condo in the Chicago suburbs, and settle into a life of comfort and complacency – at least, until the next round of layoffs.

So instead I found myself in central Illinois – hardly a bastion of technology innovation – looking for a way out of that life. I wanted to be a web developer. I wanted to be a writer – whatever that meant. I spent hours in a coffee shop in Peoria with my crappy Ubuntu laptop, writing drivel poetry and applying to temporary PHP jobs. I rented a room from my friend for $300 a month and lived on the futon in the spare bedroom which was meant to be the home of their pet rabbit. I lived on baked potatoes and peanut butter sandwiches.

I was so incredibly anxious during this time. I was embarrassed, ashamed that I didn't have something "cool" to be working on. Nothing impressive going on in my life. I was miserable. I thought I had ruined my life. I was just grinding and trying to survive and save up a bit of money. I took the GRE but never applied to graduate schools. I heard about people who had gotten really interesting jobs in robotics or been accepted into programs in good graduate schools. They were moving to places like Seattle and San Francisco. They were getting married. What was I doing? I was working for $9 an hour in Peoria and reading Faulkner. Why? What the fuck was I doing with my life? I wrote on a notebook in big bold letters that I underlined: "What is the PLAN???"

This situation continued for less than a year before my friends who were still in school graduated in May of 2008. At this point I saw that I needed to accept that my life was changing in a real way and I needed to adapt and step up to the challenge of whatever came next. By chance, just as this was happening, my temp job came to an end, and I was officially unemployed.

I had somehow managed to save up about $3,000 over the last year. I took that money and bought a one way flight to Germany. Did I speak German? No, not really. Well, a little bit. I had taken one year of introductory German five years earlier. Once I got to Germany, I realized I had no clue what the fuck I was doing and was terrified.

But then, slowly, over many weeks of being miserable in another country and struggling to read the road signs, feeling lonely and lost, I began finding friends in the hostels who seemed to sense that I was just a nice dorky kid from the American suburbs who wanted a friend. I started to get a little more confidence. I remember lying to a Chinese tourist on a tour boat who asked me what I did for a living and I said I was an English teacher. I read Dostoyevsky during that trip. I tried to forget that I had ever been a CS major. I wanted to forget all of it – forget about the bank, forget about the temp jobs in Peoria in the freezing cold winter, forget about my misspent youth.

These were clear signs I was in the midst of an identity crisis. Who am I? What am I working toward? Why? Who are the important people in my life, and can I rely on them? Where will I be in five years? What is the PLAN???

When I got back from Germany, I got back in touch with a friend who had been living in Chicago. We agreed to rent an apartment together in the city. I don't know why because I had no job in the city, but I applied at this big travel company downtown after finding a Dice.com job listing. It wasn't perfect but it had everything I wanted to work on – JavaScript, CSS, and it was a company that people respected and would recognize.

I had minimal job experience but I did have a computer science degree from a regional university and an internship at a large bank. I had to use one of my PHP job employers in Peoria as a reference. I called him and asked him to provide a reference for a job I was applying for. When he asked what was the company I said "Foobar" and he expressed surprise and disbelief. "Oh, Foobar dot-com?"

Suffice to say, I got the job, and officially became a web developer in September 2008, a month before the Global Financial Crisis began. That same month I moved into my first real apartment on the north side of Chicago. And thus began a fifteen year career.

So what was the plan? It's now obvious that the answer is that I never had one. And for the most part, everything worked out in the end.

So maybe plans are overrated. Maybe it is actually better to fumble between careers and follow random delusional goals and interests until you find something that kind of works.