Today is my last day at my employer, NVIDIA Corporation. It's been a while. Some of it's been educational. Some of it's been a slog. Of late I feel more of the slog.

I'm expected to code with agents all the time, and I do it well; people on my team ask me about how to actually configure their workflow and setup like I've done. I (had the agent write) Ansible scripts to fill the gap between the IT-supplied secure VM and "actual convenience." I asked the agent to code me up a nice status window for Emacs that can watch agents on remote machines, view their logs, and view diffs and make edits using TRAMP (Transparent Remote Access / Multiple Protocols). I'm really good at having the agents do the Toil and I'm still good at reviewing quality.

But it's been eating at me, and I feel increasingly dissatisfied with the part of the work that isn't working on those tools.

I thought for a while about looking for a job somewhere else, one of the frontier labs perhaps, somewhere that's doing more to build around AI, somewhere I could work on AI-adjacent tools. I thought of transfers to other teams internally. I thought of making my own little startup. But maybe I'm burned out; my heart isn't quite in any of that, either.

So I've quit my job.

More than that, I've quit tech. I am quitting tech after... checks dear god, has it been twenty years? ... if I count the internships and the summer jobs, maybe pushing twenty-one. Yes, I wrote unironic XSLT transforms for J2EE servlets in high school, and I was good at it. Yes, Java 2. It's been a hot minute.

what's next

Despite six years at NVIDIA, I'm not quite so rich that I can retire just yet. (Maybe if I'd taken on more risk, I would be, but I figure that when 80% of my wealth is in the company stock of the firm that's also my employer, that's as strong a Sell signal as anything, just from a risk management perspective.) On the other hand, I have a bigger buffer than I could ever have reasonably hoped for, and it's high time for a change of pace.

So I am going to study acting at City College of San Francisco, a very different world. I'd like to be an actress professionally -- live theater, not television, ads or film. I've had a taste of what it's like from some evening classes, and I very much enjoyed it.

the pursuit of excellence

I'm certainly not the first to quit tech in the age of AI, and some people are quitting tech with quite a lot to say; they have a long list of Industry Wide Implications specifically lined up behind why they quit. My thoughts will be fairly modest.

I always did excellent work while in tech, and sometimes that was valued and sometimes it really wasn't. To some extent it's one of the key differentiating factors I had in my career, to some extent it makes my life better (less toil and fewer slogs through bugs or stress from late-night alerts). But mostly it was just a better place for me to inhabit. You might never have a perfect codebase, but if your mind lives there eight hours a day, then at least you should have the power to make your life better by making it better. And of late, that excellence seems like something modestly challenged in the industry.

the unreachable star

By contrast, theater seems like the kind of field where the pursuit of excellence is something that will always be valued. So I'll aim as high as I can, reach for unreachable stars, do things that are likely to fail, if only in the pursuit of giving it all, being the best that I can be.

It could all crash and burn, and I could be back to the tech industry some year, if there is still a tech industry. (Maybe I'm just getting a short head start on the inevitable exodus that'll afflict literally everyone else!)

But who knows? Maybe I'll reach those stars after all.

And however it plays out, this is simply going to be so. much. fun.