It’s funny what sticks in your mind. Sometimes you see something, maybe just a flash of coordinated movement, super fast, super focused, and it just clicks, reminds you of something else entirely.
Made me think about that one place I worked a few years back. The pace there was just relentless. Felt like you were constantly strapped in, waiting for the next urgent thing to land on your desk. Bang, bang, bang. No time to really think, just react and execute.
That Crazy Project Week
I remember this one specific week. We had this massive deployment, everything had to line up perfectly. It wasn’t just one team, oh no. You had:
- The backend guys doing their database magic.
- The frontend folks trying to make it look pretty under pressure.
- QA scrambling to test everything yesterday.
- And then there was my team, sort of gluing bits together.
It was organized chaos, at best. We were all in this big open office space, practically yelling across desks. Handing off tasks like relay batons, hoping nobody dropped one. Fixing bugs on the fly, patching things up, pushing code like there was no tomorrow.
I barely slept. Lived off vending machine snacks and lukewarm coffee. You’d fix one thing, and two other things would break. Everyone was running on adrenaline. We made the deadline, somehow. Collapsed in a heap afterwards.
But you know, after the dust settled, I started thinking. Is this it? Is this what I want? Just constant firefighting? Felt like we were amazing at changing the tires super fast, but maybe the car wasn’t even going in the right direction, you know?
Didn’t take me long after that to decide I needed a change. Packed my bags, metaphorically speaking. Found a role that was less about the frantic sprint and more about the long game. Building things carefully, thoughtfully. It’s slower, sure, but feels way more sustainable.
Sometimes you need that crazy experience to figure out what you don’t want. Seeing that flash of speed just reminded me how glad I am to be off that particular track.
