Andrew Steinborn

I would've written about 2023 some time ago, but quite a few developments happened in my life... and so, I held off for a bit. But now I am back to tell the story of 2023. It was probably one of the most stressful years in my life.

Dis is one half. #

January 1st, 2023 comes and my first order of business was to move apartments! My old building was not particularly well-maintained, looked ugly on the outside, had no air conditioning, had lead service pipes, and for the last month I lived there, had no internet, forcing me to either go out somewhere where there was Wi-Fi or tether to my cellphone. This was not great considering I had signed up to be on-call for the holiday. A wonderful first apartment for you to have in the city, huh?

So starting in January, I went out and started apartment hunting. I narrowed it down to four potential options, applied for all of them, and was accepted for all of them as well. I ultimately chose an apartment located in a recently-built mixed-use apartment complex that would place me one stop closer to Manhattan.

Then I had to go pack my things. Not fun. At least in New York City, everyone moves so often that the moving market is extremely competitive. At least it takes the sting out of the high rent.

Some time later, I move into my new place. It's nice. I have my own fiber connection with all the works, even IPv6. There's AC that works. The building is maintained pretty well. The super is generally on top of things. I could stay here.

I don't have much time to settle down. Offsite in Miami with the Ramp Bill Pay team. This is where I had a severe burnout episode crop up. I survive the offsite and immediately take a week off work, mostly to visit museums in New York. I enjoyed the experience. But when I returned, I had to decide whether or not I was going to leave the company I'd joined more than a year ago, keep my current position, or try to make the situation on my current team work for me.

I tried the second option for a bit. It was comforting, I had no real qualms with the work, and I had reason to believe I could become an effective tech lead within payments in due time.

Silicon Valley Bank collapsed. I had to go jump into a war room meeting on a Friday to attempt to keep the spread of potential issues confined. In that one conference room inside a WeWork, I wrote scripts that would cancel payments to SVB and delay internal settlement of payments already initiated from SVB. We did not even know what the federal response would be. All of this was, thankfully, not necessary. The federal government de-facto nationalized Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank and took further actions to forestall a larger crisis.

But for a time, it was rejuvenating, so I worked on launching support for Ramp's freshly-acquired money transmission licenses within our payments platform and making other improvements. I got promoted from merely "software engineer" to senior software engineer! For a while, it goes great. I'm still having the conversations about moving teams, though, but it's at a slightly lower priority while I delivered for my existing team.

I talked with Patrick Anderson, head of Ramp's core engineering team at the time, a few times as I evaluated my options. He saw some opportunities for me to either move to our product security engineering function or move into spend management engineering (the meat and potatoes of Ramp). I rejected product security since while I had aptitude for it, I did not feel like the work would be sufficiently challenging for me. After further discussions with relevant tech leads, I was leaning towards the closest thing I had for my team's equivalent on the spend management side of the house: spend platform.

Then First Republic Bank collapsed. Then I was dropped several last-minute requirements for our money transmission launch. At that point, I pull the trigger and decide to leave teams. Over the following 6 months, effectively all of Ramp's original Bill Pay and Payments team had dissolved, and was replaced by an entirely new team.

Thus we get to June 2023, and day 1 on my new team.

My Spend Platform era #

It begins innocently enough. I'm introduced to my teammates and a new manager. I had already established a rapport with the tech lead, who was already aware that I could bring valuable skills to the table. With my entry, the team counted five backend engineers, zero designers, and one product manager.

If I left it at that, that would've been a generously happy ending to a stressful first year of the year, right?

I wish it got better, but it doesn't.

Within the next three months, a lot would happen:

• Engineers were forced to pause most of their work and focus on tech debt for a single sprint.
• Our tech lead goes on paternity leave.
• One of teammates would be fired.
• My manager would be shown the door, and our tech lead, who doesn't like managerial work, is forced to take on managerial work.
• My mother and my grandmother's health takes a turn for the worse. (Both would die in early 2024.)

The end of the year proved even more stressful. I had to pay for a last-minute flight to Atlanta and hotel for Thanksgiving week since my mother was in the hospital. I'd also volunteered to be on-call for the end-of-year holidays as well.

I would also be able to focus on a couple of important projects, but ultimately I would say that the time I spent that year was a bit of a wash. I didn't have too much trouble onboarding, I just had a bunch of unfortunate circumstances arise that made the year much less successful.

To be honest, I'm lucky I made it out of the other side without wanting to quit.

That's all for now #

The story of 2024 is yet to be written, but it has been proving to be a mix of both a dumpster fire and one of the better years I've had thus far. I'll see you in 2025...