Purpose: What I Learned from Stepping Down as Team Lead Twice

Hello, thank you for coming. My name is Alex Ptahin and I'm a software engineer at Presto Tech. Today I will talk about purpose and what I learned from stepping down as team lead twice.

A few words about me. Half of the experience engineer. Half of the experience team leader. Sometimes I ask myself what am I now after this experience.

Let's go to the beginning. We have different routes to Tech. I started in childhood many years ago with C, C++ and PHP for web development. Why was it so interesting? Because it was a play. Why do children play? It's fun. When I grew up, I lost fun because now I am an adult. I should be severe and considerate serious and respectable man. Also, we are on a fast-changing world and although human psyche has a large margin of safety, it isn't elementary to do long-term things without fun.

Less fun, less learning. Less fun, less happiness. I started to think. Does my work make me fun? What things I need to remove, change, or add? What can lead me to do things without fun? And I used to be driven by long-term goals. I want to be the CTO in 5 years. Accomplishing this goal can be as good as very bad. Reaching the big goal was very exhausting and I had no idea if it will be better. Finally, will it make me happier? All is the things I wanted. Or did I want only some part of being the CTO picture? Long-term goals can play a cruel joke on us. Let's try short-term directions. Consider them as experiments and adaptation. No focus now of achieving requirements. We can change the direction if we understand things going the wrong way. My directions will approach brand-senior engineer experience and, with some knowledge, go into team lead position, and then engineer position, and then team lead position again. Then engineering stuff also.

Currently, my direction is more defined, but it can change again and again. Will. Will. So, how we can help us to get any direction? Let's help people get what is your direction now. Want to test more architecture and design things? Say about it. Want to try to be the team leader? Say about it. Want to mental engineer? Start doing it and say about it. What should we ask ourselves in this case? It is considered more understanding of purpose, but it is another philosophical word. What is it? Oxford dictionary gives us a couple of definitions, but interesting for us it is the last one. It is meaning that is important and valuable to us. But what is essential? Some things are new from my experience, some not. I see this experience as a picture of British Canyon in Utah. Other people can say it is amazing, but I see mistakes and this is also mine and I almost forgot about this. These very subjective picture of mistakes didn't help me understand what was good and what my advantage is and how to improve other things.