2,081 Days

2,081 days. From October 3rd, 2016, when I was incredibly proud I had managed to predict Bay Area traffic well enough to walk in exactly 16 minutes before my first session of New Hire Orientation, at Facebook's headquarters (Building 15, first floor, a giant room called Son of Ping & Pong - 16 minutes felt like the perfect amount of Early but not Too Early to the first day of my new life), to the start of my Recharge on June 15th, 2022, 2,081 days will have passed.

It's a nice vantage point. Five years, 8 months, and 12 days. In this span of time, the Hardware Engineering (HWE) org went from maybe 60 engineers to planning for 10x that amount. Area 404 (A.404) Went through two major pivots (what felt like three lifetimes). I learned how to be a dad, made hundreds of friends, and landed my family in the first community that felt like home. In this time, I learned a million lessons (a healthy share of which were mistakes I was given safety to make), and the team scaled from 3 to 28, and I learned (am learning?) how to be a skip-level leader.

But those aren't the things on my mind as I write this. Today, I'm reflecting on creating a team built on values and culture, known for being as much about the How as the What. I'm thinking about incredible technologies we got to explore, like 6DOF surround 360 cameras, shakey displays, light ray displays, vortex air, metal foam, generative design, lens overmolds, optical atomic clocks, PTP, and aisle-scale DC environments capable of holding set points of temperature and humidity not available elsewhere. We hacked functioning prototypes of incredible concepts that never made it beyond the lab, and I learned to take ownership of our failures and fix it.

This is where I had to learn influence, and how to adapt to XFNs rather than asking them to adapt to us. I learned if I shared with others lessons I learned in this process, they'd get there quicker and with less pain. A few years in, we started to land incredible tech this company and its products will rely on for years to come.

I learned how to build community. HWE Leads, X-org lab teams, DE&I, RTP : A.404, LEAP, ATX. OCP/FTS, which grew to become OCP/FTI. Perhaps these letters don't mean much, but the communities represented are why I show up.

I learned how to lead an organization, and how to start by building community.

Another thing I'm reflecting on is the most intense period I experienced, in the early months of the pandemic. We'd sent everyone home, and at some point, some of them would have to be enabled to return to the labs and to keep delivering the physical infrastructure our many apps and services depend on. Jeff Fugate and I looked at each other and decided to become experts in COVID safety measures. (Which, in mid-April when we started, was an extremely tall order. No one seemed to have any idea what exactly would protect against this virus. I live near the coast and remember reading scientific articles theorizing the waves crashing and kicking mist in the air could be a carrier of coronavirus...)

We delivered a comprehensive plan to bring teammates back into the lab in the midst of the raging pandemic, the first teammates at scale enabled to come back to a non-DC site. And we got it right - through the first reintegration, a second lock-down, and a drawn-out Return-to-Office all without a single outbreak (knocking on wood).

We (in the revered words of Hans-Juergen Schmidtke) 'never let a good crisis go to waste' and started building a future of work where it didn't matter where or when you need access to the hardware in your lab. And while we were at it, we built automation for mundane, time- and soul-sucking tasks booting and provisioning devices - this brought test setup from hours to minutes. We set out to build the future of work (remotely accessible, automated, available to more), and we've landed the backbone approach on how to get there.

Anyone who knows me understands how much connection and community matters to me. From my words-don't-describe love for my family, for my friends, for those I've chosen to accept as family, I've learned the most impactful work of my career will come through creating space for more of that which is unique and powerful in each of us, and helping more feel they belong.

'More' includes my teammate Farishta. Her life is not my story to tell, but to me she resonates with someone who adds value wherever she goes far beyond her best-in-class technical skill set. What she's had to overcome, her path in life, brings power and creates tons of space for even more in this world. She's given me her support to share a special period in our overlapping time.

Farishta joined A.404 in 2020 as our first 'Remote Hands' hire. As part of trying to figure out the Future of Work, we pursued a concept we called Remote Hands. The idea is we could scale who could join HWE in meaningful ways by creating a small team to serve as onsite eyes, ears, and hands when hardware needed to be physically engaged with. In pre-pandemic times, we scaled lab facilities out to fit our growing team and devices. In the post-pandemic world, a team of 4-6 broad and knowledgeable onsite test engineers could enable hundreds to work from where- and whenever they chose. Farishta was a perfect fit - baseline technical skill set to provision multitudes of devices, incredibly quick to learn, capable of forming and delivering often-correct visions of where the team's (and org's) efforts were best spent pursuing.

Farishta hadn't seen her husband since the start of the pandemic, as he was back home in Afghanistan while she worked through the process of not only attaining her green card and ultimate US citizenship, but also completing a Master's in Computer Engineering and taking some AI courses on the side. In addition to the already-tough circumstances of a multi-year global pandemic, 2021 brought terror to Afghanistan as the 20+ year war wound down and the Taliban immediately stepped in to assume power.

A small but necessary bit of background - my career prior to Facebook was largely with NASA, where I personally met and partnered with a bunch of warfighters, including from x-service Special Operations forces, and Intelligence Community / State Department types. In one of our regular 1:1s, as Farishta was sharing with me the latest on her husband's safety in the midst of the bombing of nearby Kabul airport (on the day he was trying to get out on one of the last-available commercial flights out), I realized I had several channels to at least put a call out for anyone able to connect us with 'boots on the ground' to help him get to safety.

The entire story is hers to tell, but as I head off to Recharge, he is safely in Pakistan, wrapping visa interviews and weeks away from reuniting with Farishta here in the US.

I'm not certain about much in life, but I'm quite convinced as I'm sitting at the end of my days, Farishta and this journey going through a wild, daily experience of cloak-and-dagger vetting for certain Signal and WhatsApp channels, endless paperwork filled out over and over and over again, of false starts and steps backward, and feeling helpless, hopeless, both of us, will be something I will always take with me, and the broader work of including others has become more than a job to me.

Another thing I'm intent on pursuing in my next 5+ years (likely beyond), is building teams. In my time with Mark Roenigk and getting the privilege to be on HWE Leadership Staff, I experienced the incredible highs, the absolute magic, of getting a bunch of disparate individuals aligned around a common Why, and agreed-upon How. We came together to pursue something bigger than ourselves, and committed to being held accountable for the success or failure of others. I learned about creating something more capable than the sum of its parts - shared values, shared commitment, with people who refused to let me be less than the best version of myself, and I, them.

Recently, I've watched that team dissolve and take a new shape. It's an emotional experience to lose something that meant so much. Now that I've processed the emotion, I'm noticing a determination has replaced the sense of loss. I'm intent on building a new community when I come back, and recreating that sense of magic I got a taste of.

I doubt I'll be able to remember the names of the systems we shipped when I'm looking back on all this with some perspective, but I'm betting I'll remember what it was like to work with people I loved.

2,081 days. 92.7% of this wonderful, beautiful, crazy company of extremely talented and inspiring humans has been hired after I joined. This blows my mind. I was utterly convinced in my first months that at any moment, Someone was going to figure out I did not belong here and send me packing. Now years later, I get to welcome New Hire classes as a regular panelist at New Hire Orientation, hopefully helping them realize they belong here as much as I do.

I can remember that first day and what I was wearing (my best-fitting jeans, Nike pullover), what I was feeling (exhilaration, anxiety, inspiration), and where I sat (stage left, close to the front). 2,081 days later, I feel accomplished, and proud. And tired - Recharge is coming at a great time. See you later this summer, take care.