In early 2024, I made a huge life decision. I was going to leave my job of 12 years — an extremely secure job that I loved. I was the senior web developer at Edmonton Public Library, responsible for internal applications and systems used by staff there. It was mostly a wonderful place to work, offered flexibility in my work, and I built a lot of great web applications that I'm proud of. But I put in my notice (three months of it, in fact) and finally left my job on April 26, 2024.
Why Leave My Job?
What was I leaving my cushy, stable job to do? Well, I wasn't sure. But a number of factors led me to leave.
1. Exploring New Possibilities
The space of generative AI has been both exciting and terrifying. It seems truly intelligent and offers the ability to create many things with less effort than ever.
Want an article that dives deep into something you barely understand? ChatGPT has got you.
Need help coding in a language you're unfamiliar with? Claude.ai will fix your bugs, suggest refactors, and write complex logic.
Want to create scenes from a futuristic world that doesn't exist? Midjourney et al. are amazing.
Want to create a song with your own lyrics in an obscure music genre but are short on time and musical talent? Suno and Udio make something like this possible.
These tools are amazing, and while not perfect, they open up new creative possibilities that didn't exist before. On the other hand, this stuff is changing so rapidly that it's impossible to see what's around the corner. In a few years, we could have realistic long-form generated videos, artificial general intelligence that can outsmart any human in most tasks, or capable robots that can automate almost any kind of human labor. As a programmer, it's exciting because I can code things in hours that would have taken me days before. However, less experienced developers can do that as well, so there's an argument that this devalues experienced developers. Artists and musicians, and writers alike are crapping their pants because it appears the value of the skills they have honed for an entire lifetime is about to trend toward zero.
In this environment, I feel like you either have to embrace this new technology and learn to make the most of it or die. My employer seemed to encourage the exploration of it more than many, but my heart goes out to folks in organizations that prohibit the use of generative AI. In my opinion, that's like a construction company banning power tools for its employees and contractors. It's going to make the work take longer than for those who use the best tools.
During vacation time at the end of 2023, I spent a lot of time watching episodes of My First Million, which got my gears turning about the possibility of creating businesses and products using these new technologies. I felt that if I didn't try to harness this soon, I'd miss out and deeply regret it later. I wrote down dozens of ideas of how generative AI could be used in a number of products or ideas. Frankly, most of those are bad or implausible without major funding, but it was exciting to consider.
There were other things besides experimenting with AI that I've long wanted to do, but my obsessive focus on my work as an employee made it rather difficult for me to put significant effort into such directions. "Some business using AI" was really a placeholder for all the things I've wanted to try and explore over the past few years since I finished my computer science degree. Could I have just "quiet quit", doing the minimum possible work I could get away with while putting real effort into my own projects? Yeah. But to me, that is just gross. I'm the type who gives whatever I'm working on my all, and I loathe such disingenuousness. I'm certainly not the type of person who could have three full-time jobs I'm overqualified for at the same time.
2. Improving My Skills in New Areas
My prior job involved working on a lot of legacy applications in ColdFusion. I got into a groove working on ColdFusion applications and got really good at the language, but I felt I couldn't completely break away from doing this and want to focus on more modern and widely used languages and frameworks, like PHP/Laravel on the backend and TypeScript/React on the frontend. I felt like I would never become a truly excellent Laravel and PHP developer while I was spending so much time in ColdFusion. I had initiated a pivot to a new Laravel-based platform, but as the seasoned programmer on the team, I became the guy who handled all the legacy stuff. It was tough for me to divert my attention from it. I was addicted to working on the old stuff — it was my baby. It was time for a clean break so I could do things better for my career than working on crufty old apps in a rarely-used language.
3. Fear of Stagnation
My senior in my prior job was a man who worked there for about 20 years by the time he quit, and at the end of that, he was completely miserable. Long ago, he had lost the passion for his craft, was uninterested in learning new things or improving, and didn't care much about the quality of his work. He felt like he was in prison awaiting "release", meaning that he needed to hit the experience and age combo that would give him the pension he wanted.
At various times, he warned me not to become like him. I wondered if I'd get to a point where the only career move that made sense was to ride out my employable years in the same stagnant but secure union job accumulating pension, whether I enjoyed it or not. There's nothing wrong with that, but this idea just seemed depressing.
I couldn't advance my career as a web developer there. People in other roles I worked with earned slightly more, but the organization had no interest in upgrading my position, and I was even paid less than my disgruntled former coworker and others who had less experience than me. This was frustrating and demotivating.
To be clear, I still liked my job, had great coworkers, and felt a sense of pride and purpose in what I did. But I felt like the conditions were right for me to leave on good terms at this point since I had a successor in place who could handle most of my work.
I thought that if things didn't work out with my own business, I could always seek another full-time job that offered more opportunities for advancement and beneficial new experiences before I got too ossified.
4. Creating Something of My Own
I enjoyed creating software for a large organization, but I felt saddened that, after long nights and weekends working on projects just because I felt driven to make progress and do excellent work, I was ultimately building something I had zero ownership of. When I left EPL, my account was shut down, and I couldn't even see or use the software I built again if I wanted to.
If I'm going to slavishly devote the prime years of my career to building something, I'd much rather that it was something that I own — something that I want to make for my own reasons. If such a project becomes a business that generates reliable revenue, that's great, but even passion projects I build for their own sake, at least I could do it under my terms, and no one could take it away from me in the end.
Conclusion
So here I am — I left my secure employment, and now you know my reasons for doing so: Curiosity, ambition, and a hunger for new opportunities. And a side of sheer stubbornness. I have been in this position for four months now, and this time has been a wild ride, both fun and scary, filled with interesting opportunities and projects and some very uneasy feelings as well, which I discuss in Part 2 of my journey!
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