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2023-01-29
This post is a slightly-edited email that I sent to a friend. I sent this email shortly after I quit my previous job as a reflection on the last ten years of my life.
I have quit my job as of last Jan 20th 2023 after 8 years and 9 months. The company laptop was scheduled to lock itself at 6PM. To commemorate the occasion, I setup a Twitch stream of me playing Guitar Hero with a camera pointed at the laptop which is displaying a count down. At around 6:01 PM, the laptop locked itself and shutdown with me and a few friends staring at it.
Before I quit, I had a number of meetings with different people to say goodbye. A common question that was asked is: how do you feel about everything. This was difficult for me to answer on a "soul-searching" level. In our past discussions, we talked about the idea of delineating our lives with special events. Throughout my last week at the job and culminating on the last day/hour, I can feel the turning of the final pages of this chapter of my life. I don't have the vocabulary to describe what I'm feeling, so maybe it's worth to take a step back, to the beginning of this chapter when I started university.
I started university and this chapter of my life back in 2012. Prior to that, I was in high school in Sudbury. My family was relatively poor, due to my parents being immigrants that were trying to establish themselves in Canada. As such, I had to build my life with little help from my parents (they gave me tuition and living expense for the first year, which is a decent amount) and I was optimistic that things will get better. I was extremely lucky during the early years as I was able to somehow get hired first to Mozilla, then to Shopify. Since being employed at Shopify after second year university, my life stayed the same for many years where I was focused on school + part-time Shopify during the school semesters and full-time Shopify during the summers. This continued all the way to the beginning of 2020, when I finished the in-person portion of my masters degree. I spent the next two years writing up my thesis part time and working at Shopify full time. As you can see, my entire life has been revolved around Shopify and school over the last decade. As of the past Monday, this is no longer the case. The Shopify + school chapter of my life has concluded. During this chapter, I have definitively experienced the best days of my life, as I was incredibly lucky both in my personal and professional life. Perhaps the word "bittersweet" can be used to describe my feeling, as I'm happy with all the memories I've made, sad that I'm now leaving it behind, and optimistic albeit a bit scared about what the future holds.
The other common question that others asked is: "what are you going to do". This one is actually quite easy to answer: I'm going NVIDIA for my next job after a two week break. However, life is more than just a career and I have been thinking a lot about everything outside my career. If the last chapter of my life was a decade of balancing school with Shopify, what will the next chapter of my life be like? Perhaps it will be balancing between work, kids/family, relationships with others, and health. In any case, I suspect the stability of the previous chapter will be replaced with more chaos. I hope I'm ready for it.
Lastly, as I get older, I'm finding that I have to be more intentional to get together with friends and maintain the friendship as people get more and more busy (Justin also said this to me the other day) I'm hoping that by intentionally trying to meet up with friends on a more regular basis, I can maintain and grow friendships for the years to come.
Comments? Email me at shuhao >at< shuhaowu <dot> com.