May 25, 2019
Hi Jon -
It was nice to talk with you on Monday. Now that I am working, I will commonly be in meetings on Monday afternoons and may not be available to chat. So maybe when you get online, ping me on Google Hangouts chat and tell me the time period you are available and then I can call you when my meeting is over. We may also have to cut our calls short to 5 minutes or something like that so I'm not out of the office for very long.
I started my job on Monday and it's about exactly like what I expected. The technology is very cool and exciting. My boss is very nice and so incredibly smart I'm going to learn a ton from him. The CEO is very charismatic and driven which of course is good and bad. I saw him speak in front a classroom of college students this week and he did an amazing job. After his tech talk there was a career fair and we had a line of 50 students waiting in front of the Banjo booth. Some of the students say they have internships lined up but would happily drop them for a chance to work at Banjo.
On the down side, they really do work a ton of hours. I heard statements in meetings like "if this doesn't get done then nobody on the team is getting Memorial Day weekend off". Really? The company owns you and may or may not "give" you the weekend off? I wake up at 5:30am, dress quickly and do Crossfit from 6am to 7am, then shower, dress, eat breakfast quickly, and leave for work at 7:45am. I drive from Provo to Park City via Provo Canyon and Heber and get to work around 8:45am. I'm probably the 10th person (out of 60) to get to the office in the morning. That part isn't so bad.
But at night the whole team works until about 10pm. Twice this week I had to leave around 6:15pm (once to pick up Aimar at 7pm because everyone else in our family had plans and once for our ward bbq which I was in charge of and still ended up arriving 30 minutes late for) and both times I was the 1st one in the whole office to leave. I have never experienced that before! I'm usually the guy who gets to work an hour before everyone else and leaves an hour after everyone else goes home. It was a weird, foreign, and disconcerting feeling to be one of the first ones leaving the office. But I did it anyway and held my head high. But the 3 other days I stayed until 8pm or later each night and when I left at least half of the office was still working.
Two questions emerge. First, in previous jobs why have I always been the first one in the office and the last one to leave? Second, is Banjo a good fit for me because I've finally found a "tribe" that thinks and works like me OR is Banjo a bad fit because who wants to work such long hours? I mean, if you only want to be good at one thing - like being a great developer or a great employee - then it's fine. But what if you want to be good at several things like I want to be a great developer AND go to the gym once in a while AND make sure my kids are succeeding in school and not considering suicide every day AND make sure my wife knows I think she is important AND have a pretty substantial calling in the church. Is it possible? Not if you are working 9am to 10pm every day and commuting 2 hours.
Speaking of my commute, driving to Park City has been quite pleasant. It has been raining a ton so the mountains are completely green with tons of snow on top and the clouds have been amazingly beautiful, peeking in and out from different mountain canyons and crevices. The road from Provo to Park City is curvy and exciting to drive and passes Provo Canyon, Bridalveil Falls, the Provo river, Deer Creek reservoir, and Jordanelle reservoir - all very beautiful and full this time of year. I have been listening to an audible book during my drive so I look forward to getting in the car every morning and night and feel a slight ping of sadness when I have to pause the story every time I arrive to work or pull into my garage at home. I actually arrive home very relaxed which I love so overall I'm very surprised that having a 2 hour commute actually suits me very well.
Everything is going to change soon though. We are opening an office at 350 South Main Street right in downtown Salt Lake City and I'm going to be heading up the entire office. When that happens my commute will be reduced from 50 miles to 42 miles each way BUT my time in the car will increase from 50 minutes to 1 hour 15 minutes each way due to so much traffic congestion and highway construction. It's also going to be a much less beautiful commute and more stressful with traffic so I doubt I'll be arriving home as relaxed as I have. So not such a great fit there. Hopefully this will be a temporary office for me and later this year well build a more permanent office in Draper. I don't know if the company will actually do that but it is being discussed. Not just to ease my commute but to make Banjo more attractive for everyone we're trying to hire who currently lives or works around Silicon Slopes/Lehi.
So I started the week thinking I'm going to learn and soak everything in for 30 days and not start managing people or projects until the downtown office opens. But some things happened this week and the CEO decided we have to fire or reassign all of the California team working on part of our system and he asked if I could head it up starting immediately and try to increase the team size by 5-6 people in Salt Lake asap. I, of course, said yes and am actually quite excited about being able to rebuild this part of our system from scratch with a brand new team instead of inheriting a poorly constructed system and a bunch of dysfunctional employees in California. It's exactly the type of work I have excelled at doing Zumint and ObservePoint so I'm thrilled to "do it my way" and get started so soon. But it's also very risky and scary because I know so little about the company so far, who the main players are, how the full system works, what customers really want and need, etc. Whatever, it's going to be great.
Which leads me back to the questions I asked above. Are the long hours and long commute I have a Banjo perfect for me and my personality or absolutely the worst thing any human being should ever do? I actually think the answer is the former. The reason I've always worked long hours my whole life is because I'm mission driven. Sure I want time off and I want to be well compensated for the work I perform but what really drives me is that I want to ACCOMPLISH SOMETHING. So when my boss goes home at 5pm and I keep working until 8pm or I'm coding at 9am on Christmas morning (which I have done more than once), it's not because some boss or external factor is telling me to work longer and harder. I work longer and harder because I'm trying to ACCOMPLISH SOMETHING. The truth is on Christmas 18 months ago I was coding at home on Christmas morning for ObservePoint and 3 weeks later I resigned unexpectedly. So it was stupid to have wrecked my vacation just to be so "loyal to the company", right? Wrong. I didn't do it for the company - I did it for me. And I never regretted it, then or now.
Hopefully Banjo will be the same. I'll work long hours for a while, do an amazing job, and then I'll get bored with life or pissed off at some office politics and eventually resign. Maybe I'll resign in 3 months or 3 years or 3 decades. Nobody knows.
Maddy started her internship at Adobe this week. She seems really happy with life right now, unbelievably happy. She loves Heber, she loves her major at school, and she loves the status + pay + excitement of working for a company like Adobe who needs her and treats her really well. In a lot of ways she is experiencing for the first time things that I too experienced very early in my career and I'm thrilled she gets the chance to do it.
When we talked on the phone this week and you expressed doubts about finishing college, it scared me. I'm never going to care if you're rich or poor. I'm never going to care what kind of car you drive, what size house you live in, or where you go on your vacations. If I'm really honest, the only thing I really care about is that someday you have the same feeling that Maddy has right now. That you feel the excitement and satisfaction of doing amazing work and having status + pay working for a company that really needs you and treats you well. And life doesn't just hand that to you. Billions of people will only ever have McJobs and just feel like a cog in somebody's big wheel and they'll be dissatisfied in life. Maybe they'll harbor deep regrets about choices they made earlier in life, being lazy or distracted, spending to much time on video games or Netflix, choosing a poor college major, or quitting something they should have stuck with. In order to achieve that feeling I'm talking about you have work hard, stay focused, not waste time, and make a lifelong series of good life choices. Live the gospel, get good grades in high school, go on a mission, choose a valuable (to you and potential employers) college major and career path, work your butt off in college to get good grades, sell yourself really well and get that first job, then sell yourself even better and get a promotion or a new job somewhere else with a better title and better opportunities, then, then, then...
I know you'll make the right decision about school, whatever that decision is. Think about it, pray about it, and follow the promptings you receive. As a missionary you have the right to ask for, and expect to receive, special gifts and blessings because you made the decision to offer yourself up as a full-time representative of Jesus Christ. Well one of those gifts and blessings you should be asking for is specific direction through the spirit regarding what to do after your mission. What to study. What college to go to. Etc. In the wilderness, Heavenly Father didn't give Lehi an air-conditioned car or horse and buggy to make it easy for him to get to where he was going. BUT, he gave Lehi the Liahona to point Lehi in the right direction. That's all you are asking for right? Just point me in the right direction Heavenly Father. I know I still have to do the work.
On a sad note, a guy I worked with for about 6 years at Omniture named Don Cash died this week on the top of Mount Everest. He made a goal to hike the 7 highest peaks in the world and Everest was the last one. He actually made it to the summit but had a heart attack (at 55 years old!) and died trying to make it back down to base camp. Don won't be going home to his family in Utah - his sherpas had no choice but to leave his body right there on the mountain at 28,000 feet elevation. At first I felt sad for about 2 minutes but then I remembered that we all have to go sometime and what an amazing life Don had and what a better way to go than completing a badass goal like what he did. Much better than dying in a hospital bed with someone changing your diaper every hour and you can't remember the names of your children. Don's a hero to me.
I love you Jon and am so unbelievably proud of you. Keep the faith. Treat your companion well. Do one unexpected act of service for him TODAY. Teach with power and live your life in such a way that you'll always have tremendous power when you teach. And make sure to laugh and have some fun too.
Love,
Dad
It was nice to talk with you on Monday. Now that I am working, I will commonly be in meetings on Monday afternoons and may not be available to chat. So maybe when you get online, ping me on Google Hangouts chat and tell me the time period you are available and then I can call you when my meeting is over. We may also have to cut our calls short to 5 minutes or something like that so I'm not out of the office for very long.
I started my job on Monday and it's about exactly like what I expected. The technology is very cool and exciting. My boss is very nice and so incredibly smart I'm going to learn a ton from him. The CEO is very charismatic and driven which of course is good and bad. I saw him speak in front a classroom of college students this week and he did an amazing job. After his tech talk there was a career fair and we had a line of 50 students waiting in front of the Banjo booth. Some of the students say they have internships lined up but would happily drop them for a chance to work at Banjo.
On the down side, they really do work a ton of hours. I heard statements in meetings like "if this doesn't get done then nobody on the team is getting Memorial Day weekend off". Really? The company owns you and may or may not "give" you the weekend off? I wake up at 5:30am, dress quickly and do Crossfit from 6am to 7am, then shower, dress, eat breakfast quickly, and leave for work at 7:45am. I drive from Provo to Park City via Provo Canyon and Heber and get to work around 8:45am. I'm probably the 10th person (out of 60) to get to the office in the morning. That part isn't so bad.
But at night the whole team works until about 10pm. Twice this week I had to leave around 6:15pm (once to pick up Aimar at 7pm because everyone else in our family had plans and once for our ward bbq which I was in charge of and still ended up arriving 30 minutes late for) and both times I was the 1st one in the whole office to leave. I have never experienced that before! I'm usually the guy who gets to work an hour before everyone else and leaves an hour after everyone else goes home. It was a weird, foreign, and disconcerting feeling to be one of the first ones leaving the office. But I did it anyway and held my head high. But the 3 other days I stayed until 8pm or later each night and when I left at least half of the office was still working.
Two questions emerge. First, in previous jobs why have I always been the first one in the office and the last one to leave? Second, is Banjo a good fit for me because I've finally found a "tribe" that thinks and works like me OR is Banjo a bad fit because who wants to work such long hours? I mean, if you only want to be good at one thing - like being a great developer or a great employee - then it's fine. But what if you want to be good at several things like I want to be a great developer AND go to the gym once in a while AND make sure my kids are succeeding in school and not considering suicide every day AND make sure my wife knows I think she is important AND have a pretty substantial calling in the church. Is it possible? Not if you are working 9am to 10pm every day and commuting 2 hours.
Speaking of my commute, driving to Park City has been quite pleasant. It has been raining a ton so the mountains are completely green with tons of snow on top and the clouds have been amazingly beautiful, peeking in and out from different mountain canyons and crevices. The road from Provo to Park City is curvy and exciting to drive and passes Provo Canyon, Bridalveil Falls, the Provo river, Deer Creek reservoir, and Jordanelle reservoir - all very beautiful and full this time of year. I have been listening to an audible book during my drive so I look forward to getting in the car every morning and night and feel a slight ping of sadness when I have to pause the story every time I arrive to work or pull into my garage at home. I actually arrive home very relaxed which I love so overall I'm very surprised that having a 2 hour commute actually suits me very well.
Everything is going to change soon though. We are opening an office at 350 South Main Street right in downtown Salt Lake City and I'm going to be heading up the entire office. When that happens my commute will be reduced from 50 miles to 42 miles each way BUT my time in the car will increase from 50 minutes to 1 hour 15 minutes each way due to so much traffic congestion and highway construction. It's also going to be a much less beautiful commute and more stressful with traffic so I doubt I'll be arriving home as relaxed as I have. So not such a great fit there. Hopefully this will be a temporary office for me and later this year well build a more permanent office in Draper. I don't know if the company will actually do that but it is being discussed. Not just to ease my commute but to make Banjo more attractive for everyone we're trying to hire who currently lives or works around Silicon Slopes/Lehi.
So I started the week thinking I'm going to learn and soak everything in for 30 days and not start managing people or projects until the downtown office opens. But some things happened this week and the CEO decided we have to fire or reassign all of the California team working on part of our system and he asked if I could head it up starting immediately and try to increase the team size by 5-6 people in Salt Lake asap. I, of course, said yes and am actually quite excited about being able to rebuild this part of our system from scratch with a brand new team instead of inheriting a poorly constructed system and a bunch of dysfunctional employees in California. It's exactly the type of work I have excelled at doing Zumint and ObservePoint so I'm thrilled to "do it my way" and get started so soon. But it's also very risky and scary because I know so little about the company so far, who the main players are, how the full system works, what customers really want and need, etc. Whatever, it's going to be great.
Which leads me back to the questions I asked above. Are the long hours and long commute I have a Banjo perfect for me and my personality or absolutely the worst thing any human being should ever do? I actually think the answer is the former. The reason I've always worked long hours my whole life is because I'm mission driven. Sure I want time off and I want to be well compensated for the work I perform but what really drives me is that I want to ACCOMPLISH SOMETHING. So when my boss goes home at 5pm and I keep working until 8pm or I'm coding at 9am on Christmas morning (which I have done more than once), it's not because some boss or external factor is telling me to work longer and harder. I work longer and harder because I'm trying to ACCOMPLISH SOMETHING. The truth is on Christmas 18 months ago I was coding at home on Christmas morning for ObservePoint and 3 weeks later I resigned unexpectedly. So it was stupid to have wrecked my vacation just to be so "loyal to the company", right? Wrong. I didn't do it for the company - I did it for me. And I never regretted it, then or now.
Hopefully Banjo will be the same. I'll work long hours for a while, do an amazing job, and then I'll get bored with life or pissed off at some office politics and eventually resign. Maybe I'll resign in 3 months or 3 years or 3 decades. Nobody knows.
Maddy started her internship at Adobe this week. She seems really happy with life right now, unbelievably happy. She loves Heber, she loves her major at school, and she loves the status + pay + excitement of working for a company like Adobe who needs her and treats her really well. In a lot of ways she is experiencing for the first time things that I too experienced very early in my career and I'm thrilled she gets the chance to do it.
When we talked on the phone this week and you expressed doubts about finishing college, it scared me. I'm never going to care if you're rich or poor. I'm never going to care what kind of car you drive, what size house you live in, or where you go on your vacations. If I'm really honest, the only thing I really care about is that someday you have the same feeling that Maddy has right now. That you feel the excitement and satisfaction of doing amazing work and having status + pay working for a company that really needs you and treats you well. And life doesn't just hand that to you. Billions of people will only ever have McJobs and just feel like a cog in somebody's big wheel and they'll be dissatisfied in life. Maybe they'll harbor deep regrets about choices they made earlier in life, being lazy or distracted, spending to much time on video games or Netflix, choosing a poor college major, or quitting something they should have stuck with. In order to achieve that feeling I'm talking about you have work hard, stay focused, not waste time, and make a lifelong series of good life choices. Live the gospel, get good grades in high school, go on a mission, choose a valuable (to you and potential employers) college major and career path, work your butt off in college to get good grades, sell yourself really well and get that first job, then sell yourself even better and get a promotion or a new job somewhere else with a better title and better opportunities, then, then, then...
I know you'll make the right decision about school, whatever that decision is. Think about it, pray about it, and follow the promptings you receive. As a missionary you have the right to ask for, and expect to receive, special gifts and blessings because you made the decision to offer yourself up as a full-time representative of Jesus Christ. Well one of those gifts and blessings you should be asking for is specific direction through the spirit regarding what to do after your mission. What to study. What college to go to. Etc. In the wilderness, Heavenly Father didn't give Lehi an air-conditioned car or horse and buggy to make it easy for him to get to where he was going. BUT, he gave Lehi the Liahona to point Lehi in the right direction. That's all you are asking for right? Just point me in the right direction Heavenly Father. I know I still have to do the work.
On a sad note, a guy I worked with for about 6 years at Omniture named Don Cash died this week on the top of Mount Everest. He made a goal to hike the 7 highest peaks in the world and Everest was the last one. He actually made it to the summit but had a heart attack (at 55 years old!) and died trying to make it back down to base camp. Don won't be going home to his family in Utah - his sherpas had no choice but to leave his body right there on the mountain at 28,000 feet elevation. At first I felt sad for about 2 minutes but then I remembered that we all have to go sometime and what an amazing life Don had and what a better way to go than completing a badass goal like what he did. Much better than dying in a hospital bed with someone changing your diaper every hour and you can't remember the names of your children. Don's a hero to me.
I love you Jon and am so unbelievably proud of you. Keep the faith. Treat your companion well. Do one unexpected act of service for him TODAY. Teach with power and live your life in such a way that you'll always have tremendous power when you teach. And make sure to laugh and have some fun too.
Love,
Dad
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