why I left software engineering
I remember sitting in meetings as a software engineer hearing my fellow engineers hearing about the latest and greatest tools and libraries and realizing that I was no longer interested in the details of how we were building things. I became much more interested in what we were building and why. That is what brought me joy as an engineer - creating useful products that a lot of people wanted to use. And as such, I became drawn more to the product and business side.
As you are probably aware, it is very hard to walk away from a career that felt like you spent your entire life working towards. I worked my ass off to get top grades in high school school to then get into UC Berkeley, where I overcame so many obstacles to then graduate with a degree from the competitive computer science department… to then walk away from all of that (at least that is how it felt at first). Of course the reality is that these skills are extremely useful and easily transferrable into a vast number of fields. I continue to use both my software engineering skills and computer science learnings on almost a daily basis.
When I turned 25, I felt pressure to make a decision on my long term career path. I was wise enough to know that with a failing retirement system, life expectancies creeping higher and higher each year, and the fact that work consumes most of our life, that I needed to find something I was very interested in, good at, and saw promise in.
I am good at math and most things technical. I also have a creative side and think for myself. At work, I was one of the few engineers who loved talking to everyone because I genuinely am interested in other people. Put these broad skills together and you will understand why I was trying to decide between product management, sales engineering, and private equity. All of these fields require people skills and quant skills in some way.
Why private equity real estate? Because that was the “highest risk” in terms of being totally different than my tech background. Why real estate? Because it so happened that a friend from college and my brother were both in the space and I already had a good understanding of the space from how things worked and from having helped fund a real estate company my friend made. I liked how entrepreneurial real estate was, and it was a nice break from tech. Ultimately, I underestimated how dull real estate can be, especially since you are dealing with a necessity based asset class where you don’t need stellar operations or product to do well… The challenges and creativity required to make it in tech are what I miss most about tech.
