Post “I got fired”

Well well well…I’m so sad and pissed because I still sit with my founder the entire day today. And he even scheduled a 4-hour off-boarding for tomorrow, because he wanted to “learn” from my code. The thought of those 4 hours already seemed to be pretty painful.

But growth already came in the past 24 hours.

Attitude

I reached out to my powerhouse people who I grew with during my jobless period (See What I Learn From Building My Self-Learning Community) to share my tragedy. They asked me really good questions and suggestions to move on.

On an emotional level, one of my housemates said, “You must feel really hurt like a breakup. But similar to a first breakup, you are worried that you won’t be able to find “the one,” and that’s not true.”

On a scientific mindset level, they all think it’s amazing that I failed. They supported that in our early career, we should either play to win big or fail (See Mediocre Success Is Worse Than Outright Failure). For hypothesis testing, big failure and success both give you information on how to improve and what to do. Yet, mediocre success gives you mixed signals between luck and potential good performance. For instance, if you don’t get any conversion, it means your marketing campaign sucks. If you get a 30% conversion, it means your campaign is great and you should keep doing it. But what if you only get 0.1%? Is it just luck, or you are almost there?

A similar mindset applies to a career. If you get fired, it is a strong signal that it’s the wrong pace for me. Yet, if I get stuck at comfortable big tech where there are lots of comforts but you dislike my job. It’s an agonizing decision to make if I should leave the company.

Best of all, they said,

They meant it and I understood it too. Only when you have nothing to you, you can take more risks and go even more ambitious.

On an experimental level, a housemate suggested I “try both extreme” heuristics. Since I’ve tried 100% passionate work, but 0% mentorship. Why don’t I try to opposite and have a feel of it? Talk to great people who are working on products I don’t give a shit about. And observe how I feel. Understanding it will help me to get to the middle point between the two extremes.

Plan

On the surface, it might seem that I get back to 0 again, but there are some big differences.

1. With the AI Engineering experience, I had much more leverage to choose and place than before.
2. With this experience, I know much more about what I want and need for the next job. (e.g. I want to get a passionate job with great people, not just a well-paid job.)

With those in mind, I come up with a two-step plan.

Phase 1 — Depth: Aim for finding passionate work

During phase 1, I will stretch myself to find a place that hits these two criteria.

1. AI Engineering position in an AI x Learning Company
2. There are admirable leaders who I want to look like in 10 years in the company.

In this phase, I will reach out to AI x Learning company leaders and have a coffee chat to see if they fulfill the two criteria.

Phase 2 — Breadth: Expand my search surface

If Phase 1 doesn’t work out, I will come to Phase 2. Try to find places that fulfill the 2 criteria. For instance, maybe an AI engineering position with good mentors in a not-so-aligned company.

I separated the two phases intentionally, so I don’t get back to the “mass application to land a job” mentality.

Self Care

Take some time to love myself!

• Emotional support: Besides my original network, I reached out to many new city friends to handle this tragedy. Lots of them give me amazing suggestions and support (Vanessa, Brandon, Emily, Svit, Dev) because they are farther down the line in their careers.
• Do things that make me happy: Dance and write!
• Review the positive side: Actually feel super excited about having my own self-learning life and working on things I like! I want to experiment more with working in solitude. And I can finally finish my Lingoda credits.

New Ideas

Luckily, amazing things still happen in my day. My professional animator friend told me to build things together and a YC startup founder gave me lots of ideas to build my own things and find users. All of a sudden, my crazy brain became soooo excited that I immediately threw all these traumas away. Here are some ideas that excite me!

1. The animator friend (her work) just left her job as well! We are excited to build something that combines our skills together!
2. I still owe Phuog and Tung for their AI writing feedback tutor.
3. I cannot wait to really do some serious custom model training and fine-tuning for llama2, which I was not able to do in the past startup.

Yes, life is still quite shitty. Going to talk to someone who fired me tomorrow for 4 hours felt SUPER shitty. But I can see that another door might start to open too :)

Going to offboard now. Probably gotta hear some annoying comments like my work is “simple.” Wish me luck!