This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Brian Pulliam, a 51-year-old tech and executive career coach in Issaquah, Washington. It has been edited for length and clarity.
After studying computer science, I worked as an athletics coach for 13 years before joining Microsoft as a senior program manager.
The manager who hired me gave me the opportunity to teach a data visualization CTE course alongside him, as I had the relevant experience managing a team of younger people.
After almost nine years at Microsoft, I began seeking a new role and applied for a position at Zillow. My experience made me a strong candidate, and to prepare for the interview, I conducted a usability study on the Zillow mobile app.
I landed the project manager role at Zillow in December 2016.
I had a long-term vision for my career at Zillow that included promotion
As the PM for the CI/CD department, I ensured the build and deployment processes for all of Zillow’s workflows flowed seamlessly into production. As a result, different teams could put their work into production so users could leverage their features.
Besides managing internal customer and stakeholder communication, my role also included managing roadmaps, daily standups, retrospectives, and sprint planning.
Gradually, I advanced to an engineering manager role overseeing a team of four to six software engineers, the next step toward the promotion I wanted.
My passion for helping others advance their careers was affirmed by my experiences at Zillow
I ran small, effective experiments while working at Zillow to determine whether I could succeed as a career coach, a long-term goal of mine.
I asked myself, can I effectively apply my expertise in athletics coaching to engineering and, eventually, career coaching? Even though I haven’t been a manager for more than three years, can I still assist managers in improving their people-leadership skills?
I launched Zillow’s first #dev-manager Slack channel and monthly lunches, a community of practice, so we could impart and share our knowledge on how to be a better leader with each other. I wanted to learn more about other managers’ best practices and see whether other leaders would benefit from my teaching style.
Zillow made me realize my ability to lead a team.
Then the promotion I wanted no longer existed
As I thought I was climbing the ladder to become a group manager — the leader who manages both the project manager and engineering manager, and the role that pushed me to apply at Zillow in the first place — the role was retired.
I suddenly felt like I wasn’t working toward anything, and after four years of growth and learning, my journey with Zillow came to an end when I was laid off.
I interviewed with Coinbase for a leadership role and landed it. I gave myself two options: either work for a short period and save a year’s worth of income so I could start my own coaching career, or work for four years straight and eventually retire.
As I started at Coinbase, I also started coaching on the side
Coaching was so pleasurable that the idea of working at Coinbase for four years left my mind. I also eventually lost interest in working in tech. I started noticing a decline in ROI due to the shorter half-lives of tech solutions, particularly with AI now.
After a year at Coinbase, I was laid off. It became clearer to me that I couldn’t keep working for big corporations. I was unwilling to give more than half of my week to business results, which is essentially necessary to thrive in a leadership role. I worked with a career coach myself and realized that business results and people results are the same; it depends on what you value more.
I became a full-time tech-sector career coach in 2022. Helping people with their jobs has a far longer return on investment. Sometimes it’s decades of their careers. I found it to be more enjoyable.
I apply what I learned at Zillow in my career coaching business now
I guide depleted engineers and leaders in landing rewarding tech jobs. I teach my clients which questions and anecdotes would highlight their strengths and make them stand out.
You can’t expect everything to change to favor you and your circumstances. You have to create and find the opportunities that excite you. I teach my clients these attitude and mindset shifts as part of my interview preparation, especially when we practice answers to questions on conflict resolution.
I keep up with my small and big experiments as a career coach to update my framework, strategies, and model for my clients. I keep adding new tactics every time I work with a new client, and I’ve amassed many methodologies that I teach them.
My coaching doesn’t pay as well as my tech jobs, at least as of now, but it’s deeply fulfilling to me.
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