Curious power of written goals

If you ever read or listened to anything on goal setting you know that in addition to typical SMART criteria there is one more cardinal rule - to always have your goals written down. The author usually says that only a tiny minority actually writes them down for some reason and the very same people tend to actually achieve their goals.

It just so happens that in late 2009 I felt very unsatisfied about my then current job. The people were nice, the benefits were decent but it did not feel worth of tribulation I had gone through by the time.  I did have some idea of what I wanted even though it was quite stretching. So I went ahead and wrote down a few paragraphs. In particular, my dream was:

I want to work in a company:

- in Silicon Valley

- in an interesting/complex domain

- utilizing a few modern technologies (e.g. grid, DHT)

- having many high-quality engineers caring about their code

- with technological challenges of scale / concurrency / complexity / algorithms / AI

- where I could significantly stretch myself and make noticeable progress in my professional experience

- where I could learn a reasonable number of new technologies and practices and have exposure to smarter people

And the corresponding goal i set for 2010 was "look for unusual companies in Silicon Valley, apply every time, get interviewed in Silicon Valley at least 6 times" where by unusual I meant something more exciting than run-of-the-mill Java projects. And, at least in my experience, even here in the SFBA there are not so many such companies. I do not count GOOG and their ilk because I know I am not smart (or sufficiently grounded in CS) to get there and nowadays they are arguably too huge to be a comfortable environment anyway.

In total, I did end up interviewing at exactly six companies although two of them were in SF and not in SV proper (which incidentally only confirmed that SV jobs can be found only in SV and there's a huge difference between locations just 30 miles apart). A couple of them were very ego-bruising to fail. A couple more were interesting but I did not feel much affinity to the people or their products. In two large companies I got to the second round. Small companies were usually happy to never see me again after only one :) What I learned from this experience confirmed my hunch that it is all about "chemistry". Every single interview is different as are many if not all interviewers. 

And it is virtually unpredictable what you will need - deep Java  knowledge (the easiest part after nearly a decade with the platform), familiarity with algorithms (I usually forget a lot of the details in a year or two so it's a recurrent theme), experience with other JVM languages (e.g. scripting ones) or niche frameworks (e.g. Hadoop). The name of the game in software development is self-selecting groups and the only "nay" can seal your fate.

Nevertheless, the fifth company I went to is now my employer. They liked me a lot from the start even when I myself did not think much of them. And taking into account the caliber of their technical leaders and the complexity of the product I feel honored. Not to mention that now I am living the life I was so desperately eager to have. Aside from not having enough time anymore even to read all the blogs I am subscribed to I have not been as excited since 2003-2005 and even that high point of my career could soon become the second best in my life. 

I am looking  forward to one hell of a ride in 2011 .