Man, November 2018. I see that title and I just shake my head and laugh. People talk about “career boosts” like it just happens because you hit a certain calendar day or the planets line up. Let me tell you how that actually went down for me. It wasn’t some smooth celestial event; it was a nasty, dirty, and frankly, completely random elbow to the ribs that finally knocked me loose.
I was stuck. Like seriously stuck. I’d been at that same gig for five years doing glorified database clean-up. Every day was the same endless loop of making sure the old SQL server didn’t crash and migrating some barely used client data to a slightly newer, but just as crappy, infrastructure. I was putting in eight hours and getting maybe fifteen minutes of actual technical thinking done. The rest was just admin garbage. My brain was melting.
I started sending out feelers around the summer. August, September. I polished the resume till it shone. I tailored cover letters like a maniac. I chased job boards, recruiters, and the big names. I got interviews, sure. Tons of them. But every single one was a bust. They’d ask me about microservices, about advanced cloud architecture, and I just kept telling them about my legacy database patching achievements. It was awful. I’d walk out knowing I sounded like a dinosaur, even though I was doing personal projects at home that were way more current. None of that translated onto the corporate paper.
The Turning Point: When You Stop Caring About The Resume
I hit my breaking point in October. I was ready to quit, just walk out and take a month off even though I couldn’t afford it. My wife was the one who was like, “Just hold on, okay? Just try one more thing.” And then, I swear, my buddy forwarded me that ridiculous horoscope prediction just as a total joke. “Hey, it says your career is about to explode, don’t worry about being a legacy coder anymore!” I almost threw my phone across the room.
But the joke got me thinking. If the system—the traditional resume/recruiter/HR system—wasn’t working, maybe I had to bypass the whole damn thing. I decided to stop applying for the prestigious titles. I stopped trying to sound like the corporate drone they wanted.
This is what I started doing:
- I stopped spending time on LinkedIn and started spending it on GitHub.
- I found that old, messy pet project I started back in college—a basic, broken command-line tool for file management.
- I spent the last two weeks of October completely overhauling it. I ditched the old C++ and rewrote the whole thing in Go. It was rough, it was ugly, and it was certainly not optimized.
- Crucially, I started a simple text file, a README file, that didn’t just list features. It listed every single bug I hit. Every time the compiler spat out an error, I wrote down why it did and how I fixed it, even the stupid stuff.
I didn’t tell a soul about it. This wasn’t for a job; it was literally just to prove to myself that I hadn’t lost my technical edge. It was pure, messy practice. I committed the final, still-buggy code, with that long, rambling README, to a public repo and forgot about it.
November Hits and the Unexpected Call
November 5th. I was still moping around the office, trying to keep the database from blowing up. I got an email. It wasn’t a recruiter, wasn’t an HR person. It was just a guy named Dave.
Dave had somehow found that messy GitHub repo. He didn’t say, “I love your file management tool.” No. He wrote one sentence, something like, “The way you broke down the concurrency issue on line 42—that’s exactly the kind of mess we need someone to untangle.”
Turns out, Dave wasn’t even hiring for a Go developer. He ran a tiny, completely chaotic AI company focused on some niche logistics problem. The tech stack was Python and Scala, things I only vaguely knew. But he didn’t care about my tech stack. He looked at that rambling, poorly formatted list of failure and recovery and saw someone who didn’t quit when things got messy.
The entire interview process was maybe an hour and a half, spread over two casual phone calls. We spent forty minutes talking about why the old job was so draining and another fifty minutes talking about that broken Go program. The traditional corporate experience meant nothing. That raw, documented practice, the evidence that I knew how to fix a genuine, nasty technical problem when no one was watching—that was the ticket.
I officially started that new job on November 26th. It was a massive pay bump, a title I’d never imagined, and a workload that actually challenged me every damn day. The irony? That horoscope did come true. But it wasn’t the stars that did the work. It was the two weeks of desperate, angry, non-corporate coding I forced myself to do just to stay sane. It’s always about the practice, never the prediction.
