Dax Raad

It's your job.

It's kind of everything.

If you're not like fully developed as a person, like if you're trying to prove something to the world, if you're still insecure about certain things,

All that shows up at work, especially in such an intimate situation like that.

So fighting, conflict, all that stuff, the way I perceived the situation, even my own understanding of what was going on, just basic like how to be a person and live in the world.

I think for guys, it takes a while for their brain to fully settle.

And when it did, it felt like day and night.

I was a different person, but it definitely took a bit.

And now you can look back at that time and just kind of be like, oh gosh, what was I doing?

Yeah, everything was just so magnified and way more intense and way more emotional than it needed to be, I think.

Yeah, I think that was always there because, you know, so for me, this era was like the early 2010s or mid 2010s.

the big tech companies were very prestigious at that point.

Like there was a lot, like everyone you met was trying to get a job at either one of the big tech companies or one of the hot like unicorn startups at the time.

That was like the thing to try to do.

If you weren't doing that, you basically were going to like fail in tech.

So I felt like some kind of pull from that point of view, but I also just couldn't get my shit together to like,

do that like i knew what what it takes to there's like a thing there's a set of things you have to do to to kind of be successful there i just couldn't even do that so uh yeah i could say like oh yeah i chose not to do it but really i i just don't think i was what would you think the things were back then i mean you know there was a very structured interview process for these things uh you know you have to do certain like programming problems whatever and i think i was a good programmer and i think i'd done some interviews that were like that and i some of them i even did well in but

But the level of competition and people study for it, people focus on it, just randomly swinging at it, I don't think I would have landed anything.

So yeah, I was into building stuff.

I was into more practical things.