“I’m leaving my job at meta”
twitter.com
twitter.com
Is it that there are two extremes of this type of thing? One extreme are people who are always flip flopping, never getting good at anything and the other is people who dedicate their lives to one thing. I wonder what causes someone to be on a particular level in that spectrum? Is it personality? Is it just that the "master" has found their calling and the "jacks" have not yet? Or is it that both have found their calling? The jack loves to be a jack. The master loves to be a master.
I'm the same way. I'm good for about 5 years, tops, before I just need to do something different. But I've known lots of people who were the opposite of me. They prefer not to change projects and would be thrilled to stay on the same one forever.
Different people have different needs, and I think that's a wonderful thing. Especially when I see people happily doing important work that would have me wanting to slit my wrists in no time.
I think if I made this type of announcement publicly, my company would ask me to leave immediately.
Meta couldn't care less but all future employers or affiliates did notice this.
For convenience, I'll copy and paste the entire thread here:
1. i feel bittersweet sharing i’m leaving my job at meta in a few weeks. working in the react org at meta has been an honor. i am thankful to my past and present colleagues for taking me in, letting me make mistakes, helping me see my strengths, being kind, and sharing their time.
2. for the past three years, i kept saying i’d leave “in a year or so” but the moment never felt right. i wanted to (1) finish the new docs and (2) see a broadly usable Suspense data fetching integration shipping. after years of work from the team, both have shipped this spring.
3. i felt hesitant leaving earlier because not too long ago, leaving meta used to mean leaving the react team. that would feel too sad for me. but it is not true anymore. react has become a multi-company project, and there are several independent engineers on the team too.
4. i am staying on the react team as an independent engineer, similar to @sophiebits and @sebsilbermann . this means that i will not be actively sponsored to work full-time on react by any company, but i will stay involved in the team’s work and attend our meetings.
5. the exact nature of my future involvement is not yet clear to me. when i started on the react team seven years ago, i used to mostly write code. however, my teammates often outshine me at that, and i found myself gravitating to doing other things over time.
6. one of the things i naturally gravitated towards was explaining things. i practiced writing on http://overreacted.io, and later @rachelnabors inspired me to write http://react.dev together. i poured my heart into that project, but i bit off a bit more than i could chew.
7. what happened is that my standard for writing has gone higher but my writing ability did not. i find it difficult to write now because i can’t match the standard in my own head anymore. this will probably go away with time, but i need a little break from writing words.
8. sometimes people think i write a lot of code for react, but i haven’t been doing that for a while. aside from co-writing the new docs, the rest of my contributions in the past few years have mostly been community glue work: being a bridge between the community and the team.
9. although i enjoy this type of work, it is not sustainable to do on my own, and it has taken a toll emotionally. at some point being a single point of failure stops being fun, and i was feeling that i’m failing both the team and the community. we needed to learn to scale it up.
10. over the last year, we’ve been building a new wing of the react team focused on community glue work. i trust @Eli_White @kmiddleton14 @lunaleaps @mattcarrollcode @rickhanlonii to carry this torch in a sustainable way. i will stay very closely involved. https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/1644373027692462086
11. on the engineering side, i fully trust @en_JS technical leadership at Meta and @sebmarkbage technical leadership at Vercel. currently, only two companies are sponsoring employees to work full-time on React, but we’d like to onboard contributors from other companies in the future.
12. finally, a little personal note. this is not a part of some kind of a grand plan. i don’t do “plans” and “goals”. i just had a hunch that now that the things i care about are not going to fall on the floor, it’s the right moment to try something new and feel like a beginner again
13. idk what i’ll do next yet. might do some youtube, some consulting. i do feel a bit itchy to write some product code in react with a fast iteration cycle outside of a large company. maybe i’ll do a combination of all of that. i kinda want to just do nothing too. we’ll see :)
14. i feel a little relieved, a little scared, but mostly thankful. i’m grateful to @jingc for noticing me, @tomocchino for believing in me, and @sebmarkbage & @sophiebits for teaching me everything. work is people, and you’re the best i could hope for. see y’all at the weekly syncs!
15. </> [badge photo](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F1fGaGwacAAiKfM?format=jpg&name=...)
Best of luck to you in the future, Dan!
Yeah, they got a bit better but still not remotely close to Svelte's.