February 8th of 2026 marks the tenth anniversary of me moving to the Bay Area to work for tech startups. I didn’t quite have much to say about the tenth year so I held off.

I’ve been here long enough that it’s no longer a temporary sojourn. It’s not a step. It’s a quarter of my life and even as I’ve stepped forward I’ve managed to sink deeper and deeper roots into the earth around me.

Working in Tech

San Francisco continue, despite itself, to be the best place to work in tech. My current employer has a presence in NYC as well. Many of the younger programmers are taking advantage of that as a perk and relocating there, but SF is still where the future of software is happening.

This is good and bad as I look over it: previously outside of this geographic bubble I was an outsider. I was jealously watching my next 5 years as an engineer being roadmapped by an indifferent crowd of people up here, unaware of the influence they had on my professional life. I’d see blog posts, I’d see keynotes on Youtube, I saw the technical decisions being made in SF echoing out in ways that they just didnt in Redlands, even hough they were just as sound from an engineering perspective. Now that I am here I see how dumb most of the people running things really are. I don’t know if this is some unveiling of an existing truth or just my standards bar being raised, but I no longer assume the people here are any better by virtue of who they are; just where they are.

Technology, and I suppose every industry, is not run by the best and brightest. It is run by the self-selecting few who opt to jump into the fray. You guide the JavaScript ecosystem not by being a superior engineer but by being a superior physical and social presence.

This is not disparagement, this is encouragement! Through a mix of talent, luck, and hard work everyone can be successful here. You bump up your luck by being around other people like you, and your hard work can be spent more strategically toward what will move you forward when you’re in a tighter feedback loop.

Lockdown Was a Long Time

Over half of my time here has been over the pandemic age. This set an interesting signpost in the timeline, as the subsequent 5 years have seemed less radical in the amount of changes but significantly larger in terms of the magnitude of the changes that happened.

A lot of my ‘growth’ up to then had been in experiencing new things. Now my growth seems to be focused around seeing the same things differently. Both literally and metaphorically it has been an early adulthood of having a new address every year and experiencing the compare-and-contrast of living in a new town. The recenter years have been experiencing the same place as it journeys through time with me, and developing a deeper relationship with the places and faces I already had in my life.

And I look back again: half of my time here has been in one place, mostly quivering in fear, watching a temporary lockdown become permanent and then when it felt interminable it evaporated like a mist.

Getting Older and Second Lives

I’m getting to the age (my 40s) where things that I felt were permanent about myself and the world around me are not only no longer permanent, and some are fully disappeared. Like a Ship of Theseus my interests, my day-to-day, the things around me have changed. I’ve been an adult for as long as I was a child, and in that way I feel like I’ve come of age again a second time and I’m living a second adulthood. The people entering retirement when I started my professional life are now dying, the people who were early career managers when I started are now talking retirement, and the peers of my age are mid-career managers.

In that way getting older feels like a dirty trick: it doesn’t happen in waves, there are no well-known or predictable flags in the timeline, it accrues day by day in individual details. In that regard I am both more and less empathetic to those who came before me: adulthood was foisted upon them, probably unwillingly. They woke up one day to their 25 year old face covered in 2 more decades of wrinkles. That back-of-mind “my hair is a little thin up top” snowballed into a full on bald spot, one for which people recognize you for and you have always had as far as they are concerned.

Conversely, some things I accepted as “just what adults do” seem unacceptable to me: the way adults treated each other and their children when I was young in the 90s seem a combination of selfish, savage, and grossly immature now.