2024 in review
2025 January
See 2023 in review to see my goals/thoughts for last year.
Some thoughts on 2024
On Ramp
Career-wise, 2024 was largely defined by my promotion from staff engineer to director.
I've gone through a number of "career resets" in my life. Once from middle → high school, again from high school → college, and a final time from college → graduation. Each time, I found that credibility I had built up at the prior stage was forgotten, and I needed to prove myself anew to my peers. Upon graduation from college, I remember feeling tired since this was the third reset in 10 years, yet excited for the pressure of a new and final challenge. Whereas in school I only had four years to prove myself to my peers, after graduation I knew this would play out over the course of an entire career – easily 10+ years.
I mention the above to remark on how strange it is to hit this career milestone so early. I routinely ask my reports what their career goals over the next 3-5 years are, and occasionally they ask me the same. I always try to answer truthfully – but as of late the genuine answer has been that "I'm not sure". It's a relief to not navigate more awkward career conversations with my own managers and anxiously await performance cycle results, but there's a lingering question of "is this it?" in my own mind. I believe an easy measure of career-based success is the title/company on your LinkedIn (at least that's how I judge my peers), but realistically I've reached a summit for the foreseeable future.
As mentioned in last year's review, to close 2023 I was the Tech Lead Manager of both Procurement and Bill Pay, managing a total of seven people. Procurement was still a month away from its public launch, and Bill Pay was drowning in customer escalations and bandwidth constrained by recent turnover. Much has changed over the last year – Bill Pay has stabilized and its TPV (total payment volume) has grown 4x YoY, Procurement has grown to a sizeable customer base, and we've spun up a third team for Vendor Management. I manage a team of fourteen engineers now, and expect that it'll grow to twenty by the end of next year.
Looking back, it's been a remarkable year. I'm still coming to terms with the knowledge that decisions I make can cause a meaningful delta in Ramp's potential outcome, and I've seen this play out over the last year. From recommendations for team leadership, performance related feedback (both positive and negative), and architectural design decisions, I feel a burden to make correct decisions over and over again. In hindsight, it becomes apparent what the right choice was, but in the moment it's incredibly ambiguous. This pressure is also isolating – no one has the full context that I possess, and although I can seek advice, ultimately the decisions are mine to own.
I'm grateful to Max, Nik, and Karim (my own management chain) for trusting and believing in me, and I'm especially thankful to all the teams I work with. I recently wrote some of my management learnings and takeaways here, but I still have a long way to go to become the manager I always I wanted to have – so thank you to everyone I work with for bearing with me. I'd like to close on a note that Pablo, my first manager at Ramp, wrote in a section titled "Remember who does the work".
The fact is, many of the people working for you are spending most of their waking hours in their one life making people up the chain disproportionately wealthy, often doing a high-skill thing they themselves couldn't do (very obvious in the case of tech workers). Apparently it's a thing to not know anything about a craft (e.g. computers), bark at people who've dedicated years of study, crack a whip behind them demanding underspecified output (remember: you don't know their problem domain like they do), then feeling entitled to orders of magnitude from the wealth that work creates. I… just can't understand that mentality. You're managing people. They trust you. Keep them safe, guide them to fulfilling work, try to make them happy. What's the point of having any power in a structure if you're not going to make it great for the people most impacted by your actions?
On reading
After reading 52 books in both 2020 & 2021, I had a bit of reading burnout (unsurprising, I know) that lasted from 2022-2023. I've primarily read non-fiction after college, picking up the occasional fiction book as a palette cleanser.
I started out 2024 binge-reading books by Brandon Sanderson, who is on pace to be one of the most prolific fantasy authors of all time. I decided afterwards that this would be a year of reading primarily fantasy, a genre that I loved growing up, but one that I had tabled in favor of more "grown-up" non-fiction books. And what a year it's been! I've been reinvigorated by reading once more, reading 45 books for the year.
I'm excited to bring back a tradition of announcing my top reads for the year, which I skipped last year:
- The Will of the Many | Hierarchy #1
- The best book I read this year. Fantasy can be a chore to read, with endless chapters devoted to world-building and giving the reader context to understand what's happening. This book defies those stereotypes with relentless pacing from the first chapter, an intuitive yet layered power system, and twists and turns that keep readers on their toes throughout.
- Jade Legacy | Jade War #3
- A thrilling conclusion to a remarkable series. A satisfying ending is the most difficult feat for an author to pull off, yet Fonda Lee takes the myriad threads building throughout the series and nicely ties them together.
- The Way of Kings | Stormlight Archive #1
- Journey before destination. The first book of Brandon Sanderson's magnum opus series, the Stormlight Archive. I love the way character development is woven into the power system itself, and I found the writing deeply meaningful.
- Babel
- The only standalone book on this list, Babel features a brilliant magic system – power is derived from the meaning lost in translation between two languages. Despite having weaker character work than the rest of the books featured, Babel leverages its terrific premise to explore nuanced topics like colonialism.
Honorable mention:
- Mistborn | Mistborn #1
- Another book by Sanderson, Mistborn is narratively simpler than other books on this list, but has great character work and compelling narrative points underpinning it.
As always, I track all recommendations here, with proper ratings on my Goodreads.
2024 Goals: A Review
✅ Have better work + life balance.
I certainly have better work-life balance than I did while working on Venue, but I don't know that it's "good" in the traditional sense. My manager, Max, has an intuitive framework for thinking about burnout – everything you do at work is either energizing or takes away energy. As long as the total energy from a work day nets out to positive, you won't burn out.
There's still plenty of days where I feel stretched, given the sheer number of meetings I'm in. According to Google Calendar, I average ~2.6 hours of meetings daily, and they're largely clustered in back-to-backs on Tuesdays/Thursdays. Fortunately, meetings are less draining than I originally expected, and I've built up stamina over time to survive these. I haven't done serious IC work in nearly a year, and although I spend ~10% of my week coding, it's spent on small side quests that help me stay in touch with the codebase.
After typical work hours, I'm online most days in case anything explodes or if I get an urgent ping. Bill Pay's product revolves around money movement, and the thought of a potential unbounded loss to Ramp's business causes me some existential dread. Outside of incidents, since nearly all the value I bring is in meetings, it's hard for me to do productive work outside of business hours, which works to my benefit since I can be a workaholic.
✅ Become a better manager.
I've gone into plenty of detail above, so I'll refrain from expanding further here. I believe managing is largely experiential, and there isn't any substitute for going through situations first-hand.
2025 Goals
Try therapy
Over the last ten years, I've grown somewhat detached from my daily life. I have emotions like everyone else, but the degree to which I feel any emotion is noticeably less than when I was younger. It's as if I live in an emotional fog, and anything I experience is blunted. To be clear, I don't think I'm depressed – I consider myself happier than most of my peers, and I do feel happy and grateful nearly everyday.
My belief is that this stems from the realization that most things in life are mediocre. I remember being awed by the first expensive restaurant I visited, but at this point I've been to too many to count, and that initial wonder is gone. I feel the same way about books, music, movies, products, video games, technology, and nearly everything else – greatness is rare. I'm continuously disappointed by the low standards others have (yes, I'm judging your Beli scores), and over time I've come to take recommendations from others with a grain of salt.
The last time I felt truly alive was when I went on the Angel's Landing hike in 2022 – a hike where on average, someone dies every year (watch the video and it'll be obvious how). Being so close to my own mortality on the hike cleared the emotional fog for weeks, but over time that fog returned, and it's been here since.
Rather than continue to psycho-analyze myself, I want to try therapy. Many of my friends and peers have spoken highly of their experience, and I think it'll be a good learning experience regardless of any result. Expect a writeup on this next year!
Exercise regularly
Since running a half marathon in 2022, I haven't exercised regularly since. I'll leave the exact details of "regularly" off this site, but I plan to hold myself to this goal this year.