stretched thin.

Back when my people were younger, we would often(-ish) go out to all-night electronic music parties of various stripes. I mostly stuck to and helped put on Chill Parties, but went to no few Dance Parties, and even more Campout Parties, and especially Campout Chill Parties. They customarily ended around dawn, so we'd help with cleanup, go home, and shower before going out to breakfast, followed by a day of watching TV.

(Nickelodeon launched a new satellite channel at the time, and its initial programming was literally nothing but Sesame Street, The Electric Company, and 3-2-1 Contact, a glorious undemanding parade of amusing nostalgia, perfect for being full of pancakes after being awake for 24 hours.)

The human body, even in our 20s, is not actually meant to be out partying until dawn, sober or not, so spending the day staring at Sesame Street is what we call "cracked out." I don't know where the term came from, but that's where I've been at this week.

I don't think I've ever been on a job search with this many conversations before, but the context-switching between companies, remembering who I've spoken to, when, and what I told them, is wearing me down. It doesn't help that all but one of these companies has around 10-25 engineers, all reporting directly to one of those two founders who are white or Asian guys with PhDs. Generally folks are pretty forgiving, but even so, you don't want to get the names wrong. The whole process has out-run my historical way of managing the notes and meetings of a job search.

I've been mostly angling to lead and build a whole Engineering department, to get some of the responsibility I want, without grinding my way through a larger company. PhDs have generally never hired people-leaders, so it's an exercise in mutual education: this past week, two companies who I'm pretty sure had taken that role off the table decided to put it back on. (I mean, sure, I'll be the only manager, call me a Director and we'll pretend I'm not running the thing.) For one of them, this manifested by passing me over to an executive search recruiter they'd retained after first talking to me. I had a great laugh with them about the context-switch thing, since of course they're dealing with even more companies at once than I am.

It's a good problem to have, but my stamina is running down, and I think I need to accept an offer before the end of the month, and in the meantime I'm just going to not respond to email for a few days.