Silicon Alley

Fast forward ahead 4+ years. Now I'm here. Looking out from my apartment that I bought two years ago, which faces south over 10th Avenue and Hells Kitchen neighborhood in Manhattan. An American flag flutters in the wind over the Adolph S Ochs Public School directly in front of me, lined on each street with honey locusts. Some of those same breezes of summer's last days come though my open window. I can hear traffic rushing down the avenue and horse carriages from Central Park trotting down 53rd Street to their stables near the Hudson River. Barely visible to the east between two skyscrapers is the Times Square tower, brightly lit with huge LED screens even in the late afternoon, topped with a sign made of lights that spell out the year. 2014.

This apartment is nice. It's small, but large for a Manhattan studio. My bed is a Murphy, which folds up to serve as a couch when I have guests. I bought this apartment on a downpayment funded by my stock investments, as well as a loan from my parents. It turned out to be one of the best investments of my life, paying a very low interest rate on my mortgage (thanks to the sub-prime mortgage crisis of 2008), and also thanks to the rapid gentrification of Hells Kitchen, a popular neighborhood for young professionals who work in midtown Manhattan.

I no longer work for JPM, thank God. That place was slowly destroying my soul. The company is great, but the work there was not. Like any large financial institution, it is mired in bureaucracy. There was not much I was learning there that could advance my career. I also decided I'm not terribly fond of coding every day. I like management strategy and start-ups. That's where the thrills are. Of course it's difficult to get a management job at my age. More on that later. But start-ups are even more trendy than they were 4 years ago. Everyone would like to work at one. The economy is booming again, especially in San Francisco where the tech sector seems to experiencing another small boom. I visited SF just 2 months ago, for a job interview at a start-up there. I didn't get the job (which may have been for the best), but I realized I hardly recognize SF at all. Everyone in the Bay Area it seems works for a tech company, all my high-school classmates for example. Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Apple, Twitter, etc are all very well established and pretty much the entire populations of some South Bay towns seem to work for one of the big names there. The start-ups are still big too, and I know at least one other high-school classmate who has made it big on a buy-out of their social media app or site.

NYC too is experiencing a boom, if not to the same degree as SF. Silicon Alley is producing some major hits of their own, and the Silicon Valley big names are setting up shop here as well too to attract our cosmopolitan talent. One of these companies based here, Business Insider, has become my new employer, since about a year ago. I've become a project manager rather than a code monkey, which means I manage much more than I code. I learned how to motivate people and to take responsibility for projects that either perform well or badly. And how to work with people to achieve successes. It's much tougher than it seemed to me at first. But it's rewarding. And I like it more than coding. I could make a career of this, I think. I'm rarely bored as a result, like I was at JPM. I'm either doing management stuff, such as working with teams to achieve their goals, planning releases, or talking to executives about ways I can get their site to work faster using the people they hired to work with me, or I'm just "helping out here and there". Coding PHP scrips. Debugging an Android app. Even writing an article for our site: www.businessinsider.com/mission-motorcycles-electric-rs-r-tesla-2014-2.

I got this job by taking responsibility at JPM before I left as a "scrum-master". WTF is that, you might ask? It's basically a project manager. It was my responsibility to run meetings for the team and figure out what were our projections for the amount of work we needed to do and how well we were doing it. The scrum-master is a role which was invented as the "Third wheel" to the development team, the other two wheels being the "Team" and "Product Owner". I like to think that this is just another development in the democratization of the IT work-force. Developers are quickly being recognized for their value and knowledge of how technology ACTUALLY works, rather than the senior managers and executives who tried in the past to make them their slaves. They now get a lot more respect for what they do and how they decide to do it, if the company they work for has come to terms with reality. One of the issues with that is now the teams they're on don't have as much structure, and responsibilities are not always clearly defined. So just as Baron de Montesquieu invented the concept of a separation of powers for a democratic government in the mid 18th century, someone in the late 1990s invented this method called "Agile Scrum", which outlined three roles to every team. Think of the Product Owner as the President (executive branch), who sets the political agenda and either vetoes or signs into effect every act of legislation. The Team is the Congress (legislative), in that they actually write the laws and acts (the code), which gets sent to the Product Owner for approval. And finally there's me, the Scrum-master. In a role somewhat similar to the judicial branch, it is my responsibility to ensure an adherence of this entire process to the ideals of Agile and Scrum. The "Agile Manifesto" and our team's Working Agreement is effectively my Constitution. It is a document which can be amended, but it still has a precedent which is supposed to help maintain a balance and set expectations of the entire team. It's actually a pretty intelligent set-up, but I'm always trying to find a better way to make it fit the way software development actually works.

Anyway enough about work. How's life, Ryan? Well, it's good. I actually like NYC a lot now. I'm no longer anxious about returning to California, but it is still on my mind. I could go either way at this point. I wish I could find a career that would allow me to spend half the year in NYC and half in the Bay Area, with maybe a month to travel the world. That would be my ultimate dream. Along with a townhouse in West Village Manhattan and a Los Altos Hills mansion, if you could spare those.

Either way life is good. East coast, west coast, it doesn't matter in the end. Life is an adventure, and you just have to live it to the fullest.