Instead of paternity leave, they ended my contract

Key takeaways

Never sacrifice your personal life for anyone other than family
Your experience and skills don’t matter if you run out of energy to deal with office politics
pipestack.dev is my full-time focus now!
I’m also looking for full-stack contract work to feed the family

Recently was supposed to be my last day of paternity leave. Instead, my previous client ended my contract a month before my kid was born…

Three years down the drain – or not?

I started to contract with a centralized blockchain indexing SaaS startup in 2022 as a founding full-stack software engineer. As you can imagine, we built a ton of product in a short period of time. Of course, before we knew it, we redesigned the web app for the first time 😂.

There was also a Node.js CLI a part-time contractor developed before he vanished. Early on, I decided to take ownership of said CLI, with the hope to enforce an excellent customer experience across the web and CLI interfaces. After all, that’s something I’m excellent at, have done many times, and am passionate about.

What I didn’t anticipate was how little ownership I actually had because I didn’t play the office politics games long enough… 😰. Late nights, early mornings, weekends, previous experience building CLIs and web apps, … Nothing matters if you don’t DM / huddle with the leadership team and hammer in your opinion until your opinion becomes the only “solution”.

After three years, I ran out of energy to deal with a know-it-all individual who spent significant time playing office politics. A month before my second kid was born, the CTO ended my contract. Why?

“I feel others on the team feel you’re not happy”

🤷. I’m serious, his words. You can’t make this up 😂.

So the real question is: Is it three years down the drain? Nah, whatever happened already happened 😅. I had time to learn Rust while rebuilding the Node.js CLI, a skill that turns out to be more valuable than I initially thought. I also got an interesting view into the world of crypto and it turned out to be exactly as you’d imagine.

Lessons learned

To anyone who reads this and puts work ahead of their personal life, don’t do it. As harsh as it sounds, to a company you are nothing more than a replaceable resource (it’s called human resources for a reason).

There is no “family” in businesses. Startups have a tendency to make you believe you are part of some sort of special group of people, often even calling it a family. That’s BS at best.

If you are told what to do and how to do it, leave. Let them use AI instead 😂.

Excessive talking is often a facade for personal instability or a lack of substance. If you notice that in people, try to offer help. If that doesn’t resonate, distance yourself. Never talk to your manager about it, it may lead to the end of your contract.

In my opinion, the crypto world continues to be a bro-dominated house of cards built on scams, fraud, and money that appears out of thin air. The very few meaningful use cases, e.g. for a Russian or Iranian citizen abroad to send money home to their family, are simply just that – a few use cases. The rest is fishy based on my personal experience over three years 🐟.

What’s next?

What better time to take risks than with two kids under four 👶?! I’m building pipestack.dev, a workflow engine like Zapier or n8n, but you bring your own code and run it wherever you want to. On-device, on-prem, at the edge, in a cloud environment, or a mix of the above.

Check out the Changelog to see what I’ve been up to. For now, I have very little time to invest besides raising my kids, but having early customers who see 80%+ improvements in their workflows across various metrics is motivating enough to keep going!

It is incredible how much progress you can make when you are in charge of your own destiny. As a solo founder, there is no office politics or know-it-alls who don’t actually know it all.

However, Pipestack doesn’t pay the bills just yet. So if you have any contract work for a full-stack developer, please let me know. I’ve been doing this for over 20 years.

Conclusion

Is life easy at the moment? Of course not. Is life full of surprises and opportunities? Absolutely!

Do check out pipestack.dev and let me know if you have any feedback. It’s early, but It works! It’s Live!

👋