Off the name game

I keep returning to Eric Hoffer. A longshoreman who hauled cargo on the docks, barely formally educated, who read and wrote his way into philosophy on his own, and then turned down a university professorship.

I've long admired that kind of life. But I'm hopeless with my hands, and I'm fated to live as a knowledge worker. So how do you live with that kind of grace from inside an office chair? That question is where this piece starts.

I went to a school in Korea that no one had heard of. It was a young school, with only a handful of senior classes above me. By the time I graduated, it had been absorbed into a name-brand one. Years later, that rebrand helped me land my first engineering job, in my mid-thirties, at a fintech startup of around 200 people. Talking to colleagues there afterward, it became clear the school name had done the heavy lifting. It bumps the resume hit rate, that much is true. But it doesn't speak to what I can actually do, and it isn't a name I earned. The fact that a decade-old diploma still carries that much weight has always sat oddly with me.

After spending some time living abroad, I came back to Korea and tried to find work. I floundered through interview after interview. I just didn't know nearly enough. Looking back, I hadn't even shown up with the bare minimum. They came in with expectations attached to that name, and what they got was someone too underprepared to actually work alongside.

Once I left that first nest, the survival problem never quite went away. I'd join a company and within months the money would tighten, the air would turn cold, and the rumors would start. A few days later the rumors would firm up: someone was leaving, or someone had been asked to leave. Working at a small startup means you carry the noise home with you. If only it had been the work keeping me up.

From there I stopped being picky. Contract or full-time, didn't matter. I dug into frontend, picked up adjacent stacks, anything I could put my hands on. The market was freezing and the interviews had taught me what I lacked, so I bet on widening the skill base. Realistically I couldn't chase both the name brand and the actual skill. Instead of grinding leetcode and system design rounds for the big logos, I went the other way, broadening enough to stand on my own.

Algorithm puzzles and system design interviews, the more I sat with them, the less they felt connected to the kind of competence I actually wanted. Doing well on a test doesn't translate to doing well at the job. I already knew that pattern, since a school merger had handed me a brand I hadn't earned. The roles you get through those tests tend to sit on high-traffic, massive-user systems, not on a seat where you can stand on your own. My read was that the future tilts toward small teams working narrow segments, and that's the world I'd fit into better.

It wasn't easy, of course. I'd come from an office with a river view, a company cafeteria, a warm subsidized lunch. Then I moved to a small startup and the gap was its own kind of shock. (Don't ask me the connection.) The Ukraine war had knocked paper towels out of the building's bathrooms.

I missed the comfortable world. I could've gone back; they might've taken me. Every time that pull came, I'd think it through, and every time my choice still made sense, and the discomfort didn't quite earn the U-turn. Bearable, in other words. (If there are no paper towels, your trousers work fine.)

The moment I committed to leaving the name-brand world, things started moving that had been stuck. Things I'd never even broken ground on, lost in my own head. todoglow and devglow belong to that list. Actually building and running them taught me what reading about systems never could.

A few days ago I moved the todoglow backend to Cloudflare Workers. (I've written separately about why I prefer serverless.) The trigger was pricing, but along the way I figured out for myself why newer DB services like Neon and Supabase started offering DB access over HTTP. Traditional TCP connections don't hold up well in a Workers runtime. The texture you pick up from running things yourself lands harder than anything an authority can tell you.

Leaving the name-brand world pulled the floor out from under me with risk and instability, but in return I became a learner. A small step closer to the life I'd been admiring from a distance.

When you spend time inside a lab you built yourself, you pick up things that weren't on the plan. Each one links to an earlier one and opens the next. The loop is its own quiet pleasure. Whatever my title is a year from now, I have a sense that digging deep into this work makes the rest of life more lucid too.

Someone asked me recently about FIRE. Why does Jensen Huang still go to work at NVIDIA? After turning it over for a few days, I came around to thinking his freedom doesn't come from his net worth, it comes from a kind of mastery. If everything he owned were taken from him tomorrow, he'd still be standing exactly where he is.

Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains. Hoffer again. The longshoreman. The name-brand world, I've come to think, is just one form of that belief.