“Work dad.” Where does that come from?

In the beginning

For most of my career I worked for Google. Almost 14 years. I learned a lot there because I had a lot of room to fail. Technical failures, for sure, but also work relationship failures. I can safely say that I learned much more from struggling with a single production issue than I did during my 2 years at grad school. And I distinctively remember ever single personal failure that affected my team or people around me and the long-term effects of those failures. Because of that, I’m pretty good at identifying behavior patterns that would lead to them again.

I also really like teaching people things I learned. It is one of the things I most like doing, more than coding or launching a new thing actually. At some point I plan on retiring from the coding thing and take a teaching position back at my home town Recife.

Change comes in bundles

Anyway, in June 2021, after almost 14 years, I decided to leave Google for a startup called Check. That wasn’t the only change though. In April 2021 my third child was born. Yes, my wife and I decided to have a third child, during a pandemic, at the ripe age of 40. Oh, and we also moved from California to Florida in July 2021 so had to coordinate a cross-country move with 3 kids aged 9y, 7y and 2m and a dog.

A startup was a completely new experience to me. It was the first time I would work at one. Before Google, I was a researcher at the Computer Science Center at UFPE (Federal University of Pernambuco).

Of my experience at Check, the company, all I will say is that iit was more positive than negative. Of my experience with the people at Check, that’s where Work dad came from.

See, when I joined I was one of the most experienced full-time engineers and also the oldest. Since I turned 40 in 2021, I’ve been fairly self-concious about it so I deal with it the only way I know: making fun of myself and taking every opportunity I have to teach and mentor people.

I started mentoring a few eng colleagues that were in their early twenties. And I mean early, like, 20-25 year olds. It occurred to me during a mentoring 1:1 with a 22yo engineer that I was old enough to be their father. So I jokingly told them that.

“Yeah, that’s true! In fact, me and another 2 swes call you our work dad”.

I remember being very flattered but also thinking “dear god, I really am older than most of my co-workers!”

Even after leaving Check and joining Gympass, I still maintain contact with a few of them. It then occurred to me I could keep doing the mentoring thing I like to do, but to a broader group of people, by writing it down.

And that is how Workdad Dev was born.

Cute, but what should I expect?

A few things. First, I will talk about experiences that I had in tech that might be worth your time. These will be things I learned from failing and want to write down so you can read it and not have to learn it the way I did.

In some of those posts, I will use a name, Riley, that will be the main focus of the story. Riley will usually (but not always) refer to a different person in every post. You can decide yourselves what their gender is.

Second, I do like tech in general and retro tech in particular. So there will be posts about that too. Usually it will be something that I’m working on as a hobby or something from days past that I got my hands on because eBay is a thing since I moved to the US in 2018.

And some times it will be “old man yells at cloud” rants, but it should be easy for you to spot those and skip them 😊.

Really? You want me to read?

Yes. Sorry, I’m old school. I don’t have the energy, time or really want to produce videos of any kind for this. I write on my my spare time which usually means after everyone at home is asleep. Sometimes I will do this after loosing my sleep because my 1yo woke up in the middle of the night. So yeah, no videos.

But,

I will strive to break up a post in sections of a few paragraphs to make it easier to skim through it. Might be possible to skip a lot if I do a good job 😊.

Thank you, please come back!

All in all, I have lots of things to say and I hope you enjoy reading it. Let me know on my twitter.