from a former colleague:
Day 5 after quitting my dream job at Meta. I'm ashamed to admit that I forgot how to code from scratch without Meta's infrastructure.
At Meta, everything was already configured. CI/CD pipelines, deployment scripts, monitoring dashboards - all handled by platform teams. I just wrote code that was mostly already available and pushed to main.
Today I asked Chatgpt "how to deploy a simple web app with git" like I'm fresh out of bootcamp.
The weird part? At Meta, we always looked for existing solutions. Everything had to be consistent, scalable, battle-tested. "Don't reinvent the wheel" was how many big tech companies worked. We'd search the internal wiki, find the approved pattern, modify slightly, ship.
Now there's no internal wiki. No approved patterns.
The imposter syndrome is real. My LinkedIn says "Ex-Meta SWE" but I'm watching YouTube tutorials on basic DevOps. Reading documentation I should probably already know.
But you know what? I pushed my first commit to my own repo today.
It's just a "free flights on points landing page" web app built using v0. Took me 3 hours to deploy something a bootcamp grad could do in 30 minutes. But it's mine. My infrastructure. My decisions. My mistakes to learn from.
At Meta, my code touched millions of users. Today, my app has exactly one user: me. And somehow that feels like more of an achievement.
For the first time in four years, I'm not looking for the "right" way to do something. I'm figuring out my way.
Whether you quit yesterday or you're planning your escape for next year, Follow me and let's build this community because figuring out life after the 9-5 shouldn't be a solo journey.
Sometimes going backward is the only way forward.