What I want to become when I grow up?

Every once in a while I have to revisit this question and this time I took a bit longer to answer it, trying to inform it based on multiple blog posts by Chip Huyen and Eugene Yan. As Maleknaz says I have the luxury of choice and I’d like to explore my options while I can.

What follows is not really a list, it is an attempt to say, in order, what I actually want out of the working part of my life and why. I am writing it down mostly for myself, so that next time the question comes around I have something to argue with rather than a blank page, and so that I can hand it to people I trust and ask them where I am fooling myself.

The frame I kept coming back to, the one that reorganized how I think about all of this, is Chip Huyen’s post on measuring personal growth. Her idea is to treat yourself as an investment and ask what your interest rate is: how long does it take you to double? In school the doubling was fast, each year added more than the last. Later it slows down and changes shape, and the question stops being “am I learning” and becomes “am I still compounding, and toward what.” She pairs this with a way of measuring growth by subtraction, by which of the big worries you no longer carry, and with the idea that the big problems of a life, career and family and finance, each take about a decade to work out, so the point is to solve them well enough to move on to more interesting ones. That is the lens I am holding everything below up against. Two other pieces sharpen it: Eugene Yan’s split between values and superpowers, what I care about versus what I happen to be unusually good at, and Chip’s older and blunter question, what are you optimizing for. None of these is a one-time answer. They drift as life stages change, which is exactly why I need to write down where they sit today.

Paid well, by a company that can afford it. I would rather say it plainly than dress it up: I need to be paid well by a company that can actually afford to pay me. The only reason I sell my time to a company at all is that I need the money, otherwise there is a long list of other things I would rather be doing. Pay is also the one signal of being valued that cannot be faked with kind words. A company can tell me I am appreciated for free, but a number in a contract costs them something, so it is the number I believe. The “can afford it” half matters just as much as the “pays well” half. I have been close to a situation where someone genuinely valued my work and simply did not have the budget to back it up, and good intentions with no money behind them do not reach anyone’s rent. So I read financial health as a precondition, not a bonus. It is worth nothing that this is a satisficing condition not an optimizing one.

People I am glad to be around, and can learn from. I do not want to be the only person on a problem. Being alone on something is isolating, and more than that it usually means the problem is too small to need anyone else, which means it is not important. I want problems big enough to need a team. What I am really screening for is not whether individuals are nice, most people are nice, but whether the culture is genuinely non-competitive, because I have watched a friendly group get turned into a quiet competition by the incentives above it and everyone had to play along whether they liked it or not. The part of work I love most is sharing the details and the struggle as they happen, not just presenting the finished result at the end. A good test I have started using is simple: in the morning, am I glad to get up and go talk to these people, or am I bracing myself. Chip Huyen makes the point that colleagues matter more than you expect, because after school the easy default friendships disappear and work quietly becomes a large part of your social world. I have found that to be true.

Deep work I own end to end, backed by a manager who gets it. This is the one that decides whether I am any good: deep work that I get to direct from end to end, backed by a manager who understands the hard part. I do not mind grunt work, every job has some, but when it becomes most of the job I stop having anything to think about on a walk and anything to talk about with a colleague, and then I start dreading the mornings, and then I get worse at the very thing I did not even want to be doing. Research is the clearest example of the kind of work I mean, a real problem worth solving rather than something manufactured to hit a deadline or produce a publication. I want the whole arc: to find the problem, understand it, propose the approach, build it, and see the impact. I want to build. The framing and the steering matter to me, but I do not want to hand off the making of the thing and live one step removed from it, because the real problem usually lives in the build, in the details that only show up once your hands are in it, and those details are where I do my best thinking and get my most stubborn satisfaction. When I say I want to direct, I mean I want to own the arc end to end and stay close enough to the code to feel its constraints, not that I want to toss a spec over a wall and let someone else carry the weight. If anything I want more of both over time, more say in which problems we take on and more depth in how they actually get built, and I am wary of any version of seniority that trades the second away for the first. The manager part is not vanity. A manager who cannot follow the work forces me to spend most of my time selling it instead of doing it, and when I hit a wall they push harder instead of helping, because they cannot see what the wall is made of. A manager who can go deep with me appreciates the genuinely hard thing I did, not just the shiny part the user sees. Related to all of this is that I need to keep learning. The clearest signal I have ever had that it is time to leave is the day I notice I have stopped learning, a lesson Chip states plainly in the same career-advice post. I have talked about the concept of an elevator, and I think asking for such a thing in a job is too much, but moving in that direction is a nice perk. After all, most of those elevators I have been lucky to hang out with, I know them from professional settings.

A humane, deliberate pace. Here I will say the thing directly: a stressful job is not my choice. I think “move fast and break things” is one of the worse ideas our industry has adopted, and I do not believe anything real gets built while a place is in that mode. I want deliberate work, real deadlines that can move when they need to, and the ability to close the laptop and not be thinking about work in the evening or on the weekend. I have seen the other version up close, where people work through the night to hit a date, and I want no part of it. Eugene Yan’s commando, soldier, police framing is useful for locating this: I am not built for the frantic early land-grab, and I am not built for pure late-stage maintenance either, which puts me somewhere in the deliberate middle. I have not fully settled where, and that is one of the open questions.

A company whose values I respect. I have to respect what the company actually does. The test I trust is not the mission statement, it is how the money is made, because that reveals the real values. I want the work to improve the lives of the people who use it rather than exploit them. Even inside a single company I have gravitated toward the parts that make a user’s day better rather than the parts that squeeze more out of them, and if a better experience also happens to make the company money, wonderful, that is the alignment I want. If I were ever asked to make something more addictive or more extractive at the user’s expense, that would be the end of it for me. This connects to a longer thread I have been pulling on separately about how companies drift from solving real problems toward extraction once they are established, and I would rather join one before that turn than after it. I think organizations like 80K hours have some interesting things to say about this, but they have some aspects that I don’t quite understand, probably there is some sort of “Malcolm Gladwell fallacy” (as Chip Huyen names it: “they sacrifice the truth for the sake of crafting a narrative”) is happening there that makes me uncomfortable to follow them.

A trajectory I steer on purpose. This is the thing I keep circling back to, the one that is actually closest to the title of this post. My trajectory has a clear shape. I started in fundamental, abstract work, moved into applied research, then further toward product and direct impact, and each step made the work more immediate and more visible. At the time each move felt like following the current, but looking back I played my cards so that this was the only place they could lead, which tells me the direction was mine even when I was not narrating it to myself. What I want now is to name it out loud and steer on purpose. Two things sit underneath this. The first is where I am going: a role where I own real research problems and see them built, increasingly setting the direction for a team’s work while keeping my own hands in the building, rather than trading one for the other as I get more senior. That is not a departure from how I work, it is more of it, more say over which problems we take on and more depth in how they get built. The second is a rule I have learned the hard way: being good at something is not a good enough reason to do it. I am good at a number of things I have deliberately chosen not to build a career on, because they are not valued or not paid in a way that matches the value, and doing them anyway would be pointing my strengths in a direction I do not want to travel. Eugene Yan’s superpowers framing is only useful to me once it is crossed with my values, otherwise it just tells me where the demand is, and the places that most want a given skill are often the places I least want to be. This is where the doubling-rate question from the top of the post does its real work: a job that pays fine and feels fine but does not compound toward where I am going is, by that measure, a dead end, no matter how pleasant the days are.

Treated as a respected adult. Last, and I am still working out how to phrase it, I need to be treated as a respected adult. I need to know I am safe disagreeing, including with people well above me, and I need the people above me to actually respond to reasonable needs about how I work rather than treat them as an inconvenience. There is more in that last part than I have managed to write down yet.

If there is a bias in all of this, and I think there is, it is that most of it is about the texture of the present, what the days feel like and whether I can respect myself in them, and comparatively little is about the future or about pure ambition. This is partly that I have learned what signs I should be looking at right now that are best predictors of the future. The trajectory section is where I try to face the future directly, and it is the part I most want to be argued with about. I am putting this down less as an answer than as a draft of one. If you know me and you think I have described someone other than who I actually am, or someone smaller than who I could be, I want to hear it.

[UPDATE 2026-10-07] For a reverse interview questions I added a set of questions and their signals that I use to check these values against a real offer.