Posts tagged: work

It Will Be Hard To Do More

2026-05-22T06:23:20Z

Recently I was given a raise at work after I broached the subject with my manager. I wasn’t sure what the outcome would be but I have learned two things in nearly a decade in corporate America:

No one will fight for you harder than yourself
The worst they can say is no

The Raise #

So I talked with my manager about my workload and compensation, and to my surprise he took me seriously. He went up the chain with some accomplishments of the year that I wrote up for him (it’s his job to advocate for me, but it’s certainly my job to give him the ammunition to take into battle). Before much time had passed, a big wig put some time on my calendar. I had a good relationship with my (then) manager, and even with the big wig, so there was always some amount of personal connection amidst the money-talk.

The Reorg #

Cue a managerial change and reorganization of the team. The dust settled, and my manager wasn’t my manager and the big wig wasn’t a big wig over my team anymore. The details aren’t that relevant, but the outcome was that my now manager is someone I don’t know personally — back to square one of professional-relationship-building.

The Conversation #

Due to the timing of it all, when my raise became official it was this new manager who signed off on it. It was their happy-responsibility to have a quick chat to tell me it was official. But that conversation was the most awkward of the three.

Does this raise of X% close the gap with the other competing opportunities you mentioned to (previous manager)? Because it’ll be hard to do more than this.

???

Hard to do more?

I was taken aback initially. It felt almost threatening.

I really wasn’t sure how to respond. I think I was grateful and cordial, talked about how I really do believe in the mission of our work and I’m thankful that I can receive a raise. This lady is nice but she doesn’t know what my “other opportunities” are, so there’s no honest answer for me to give. I wanted to be sarcastic, crack a joke about record profits, make light of her describing me as a “critical player in enterprise deliverables,” but I’m not trying to make enemies.

The Reframe #

So I called a friend to vent, of course, and he gave me some good advice.

It was a threat.

But not in the way I took it at first. My friend has been at the same company longer than me, and he expounded on her words: “it will be hard to do more.” I felt like she was annoyed with me for fighting for a raise, but my friend said she was probably just trying to give me a realistic view of my position in the company. “It will be hard to do more” means there are processes in place at such a large enterprise. Rewarding start-up-like behavior and contribution just isn’t well-supported. It’s much easier to let someone quit who’s been with the company a decade and replace them for 20% more than it is to just pay them 20% more. If someone (like me) isn’t satisfied, that’s not the only thing in the conversation - time at the company, time in position, time under specific manager, etc. all are hurdles to more compensation, and I’m referring to salary anyways, equity feels like it’s out of my grasp. But if I’m gone and market conditions dictate that my position and responsibilities are worth 20% more than what I was being paid, that’s what the position will be posted at. My previous manager and the big wig were the types to say policy-be-damned when it would get in the way - it might be how I got this raise in the first place. But no shade to my new manager, they’re just doing their job.

In the end, they were just being honest, and I should appreciate that.

The Relief of Earning

2026-05-08T05:43:39Z

The Setup #

Work has been crazy for months, and I haven’t written too much about it, a few notes here and there but nothing substantial. The craziness is sourced in a pretty cliched-scenario where we have lofty goals and important things to build but the foundation on which we are building, like architectural decisions, is basically wet sand. So as I’ve been trying to find my footing in the mud I feel like I end up spinning my wheels moreso than making any progress. The chaos led me eventually to approach my manager about my compensation - I make a nice living but for the stress I’d been feeling I could certainly go make more. My manager successfully fought for me up the chain and I was given a slightly bigger carrot, but that’s not the point of this post. I started to feel even more anxiety after I was told about the raise because, just like with AI and agentic coding, now I was sure the expectations would be even higher. I didn’t think anything would actually come from me asking my boss about a raise, but now that it did I was afraid the ceiling of expectations was just going up up up.

The Carrot and the Anxiety #

That’s where the relief of earning comes in… I mentioned this to my project manager, and we have candid conversations regularly, and he told me something that I think some people might have been offended by but I was genuinely relieved to hear it. He said he’s glad I got a raise, and that he told our boss to not really pursue it for me until I had actually delivered something. So even though I feel like I’m spinning my wheels a lot, my direct leadership sees real value - and the relief is that I can rest in confirmation that the carrot is a response to work I already did, not a quiet elevation of expectations.

Forge Ahead

2026-02-17T05:14:15Z

Yesterday’s Reflection - Contentment and Work has a second-part this morning. As I was wrapping up a project I didn’t realize the closed-off-ness of leaving… I handed in some notes, and mid-message to someone the clock struck midnight and I was locked out. It’s fitting to be honest, and now in the wake of yesterday’s contentment post, experiencing some more loss than I expected, today we forge ahead.

My main focus for work now is a project I will refer to as forge. It is what I will bring to Caterpillar Autonomy but I can only build it thanks to the gifts and experience God has given me. The thing I want to put on paper is a short list of experiences I think God in his sovereignty, gave me over the last few years and what they provide for me for Forge.

Cat Reman Platform #

One of the first things that comes to mind is another project I was sad to lose: a platform I started for an analytics team in Cat Reman. That began as a simple python cli to automate some developer operations that was otherwise a dozen clicks through the AWS console. Using [boto3] and some simple python I gave that team the start of some real velocity gains. Eventually that grew into a larger kubernetes-based service where the data science operations: code quality, deployment, updates, webapps, etc. were all handled by our platform. It wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t self-contained, it was a set of things kind of glued together with systems and scripts, but it worked, it works today and is under fantastic ownership.

What I learned just from starting that cli was to be passionate about solving problems. No one asked me to make it, but it needed made, and the team is in such a better place for me having started it.

Kedro and OpenShift #

Another short project I was able to participate in a few years ago was leading a data-syncronization task into a fiery horrific crash that lasted weeks - neigh months longer - than was necessary or appropriate… The details aren’t relevant - I was the lead dev in a new place tasks with syncing up data between 2 applications. Ultimately, could’ve been a python script but I over-designed a kedro-based solution because of some requirements I misunderstood. Part of that misunderstanding was not knowing how to get the requirements I needed, but they weren’t provided in full, I didn’t know any better, so for weeks we were a corporate meme trying to use python to update a database that no one on our team understood if we were allowed to write to…. It was very confusing.

But what I learned was a lot about gathering requirements, questioning assumptions, and the importance of understanding your constraints as fully as possible as early as possible.

A Real Platform #

Then one of the biggest blessings I see for Forge, is the experience I’ve gotten recently with AWS at scale… Not 1 or 2 services created with Medium.com copy pasta tutorials from docs… but experience working in a large project across many accounts, supporting several teams, using a wide variety of technologies from Terraform to Kubernetes.

On this project I learned about practical system design and gained a lot of confidence in supporting systems that are complicated… I’m not the smartest guy in the world but I’m no dummy, and even while lacking fluency in the system I was supporting on this project I learned a lot of troubleshooting skills and gained confidence in my ability to troubleshoot complex systems.

I’ll need this for Forge - which will break certainly, but I’ll be there to fix it and I’m sure I can because I’ve done these other things.

Fin #

The Lord has been with me through these projects - he has certainly blessed me with a skillset and personality that lends itself to being really useful in the Tech world I’ve landed in (which is a whole ’nother story of God’s sovereignty and provision). I am very grateful for the swath of experience I’ve gotten over the last 8 years or so, and this season I’m in of change is rocking me a little more than I anticipated but by God’s grace I think I see the purpose, or at least a purpose, and I pray I am making the choices for work he wants me to make.

Reflection - Contentment and Work

2026-02-16T05:42:13Z

Philippians 4:11

Not that I speak from need, for I have learned to be content in whatever circumstances I am.

Context #

This verse showing up in Spurgeon’s Morning and Evening is a divine grace to me. Today is a significant day in a journey God has had me on towards contentment. The circumstances of that journey, the specifics, are known to some but I can still speak generally enough about it in this reflection because the generalities are not unique to me - anymore than the requirement to learn contentment, for it’s not a natural state for a man.

For me, like a lot of others, it’s about money right now. Over the last few years I’ve been able to make a pretty significant income and God has blessed me through the work I’ve done, but something I have noticed is the work itself has felt less and less blessed, and more like a burden as the goal became money. I want to be a billionaire and never concern myself with a financial struggle - but this is childish thinking. The last few years have shown me that I can work, a lot, and make money, also a lot (relatively speaking). I don’t feel as though I’ve wasted time necessarily, the amount of work and the time the work takes are different things. But where I may have recovered some of the time in overworking, I certainly gave up other things: fulfilment and excellence to name the top 2. As I’ve not been content, and have striven for more it’s become clear that wanting more is itself a burden.

Today marks the end of some income that I’ve been able to work for - not all of it, I’m extremely blessed in Cat Autonomy 2.0. The facts are though that through the circumstances God has brought me recently, I’ll be making less than 50% of what I’ve been able to make over the last couple years… By God’s grace we still have more than enough, and by his grace again today is a significant day for me to step through a doorway of contentment and officially realign my work priorities with the worldview Jesus has called me into.

Contentment and Work #

I have been sort of fighting off a belief that I’m on a literal mission from God in Caterpillar Autonomy… If someone could see my inner-monologue play out they’d certainly get Blues Brothers vibes…

I hope I’m not just reaching for some grand facetious meaning for the work I’m now doing to distract myself from the changes coming to my paycheck. It really feels to me like God has prepared me in many ways for the work that’s in front me. I’m thankful for that preparation and now it seems like it’s time to give up the desires for riches and focus on doing something more than closing tickets and supporting a small team of people.

As God calls me to contentment in my personal life, I think he’s also planning on blessing the work I’m doing. Earlier I said I have been very blessed by the work I have been able to do, but I don’t know that God has blessed the work itself - much of what I’ve done was filled with mistakes you only learn by doing something the first time… Certainly in some ways he has blessed those things, but I see something “just bigger” in Cat Autonomy, and I think I’m here to play a real role in it

maybe like Joseph in Egypt

like I said - literal mission from God

I’ve had to give-up some pay to play that role, but the Lord has taught (and is teaching) me that there’s much more to work than a paycheck, more to life than money.

It is easy, very easy, for me to roll out of this line-of-thinking, I’ve done it several times even while writing this… but I am sure contentment is something the Lord has for me. Today’s significance is just a temporal milestone, a date that was approaching at a constant rate of change… The day is here, today’s meditation is on contentment, and the Lord is doing a work in and through me. Amen.

Cat Autonomy 2.0

2026-02-09T06:07:12Z

I wrote about my new role New Job - Caterpillar Autonomy a bit a couple weeks ago during an insanely busy time - having just started the role and wrapping up what ended up being side-work, paired with some sleep-deprived ADHD hyperfocus on my new responsibilities and Nexus, that post is less of an update and more of a mind-dump. This post is meant to be a calmer update about my upcoming time with Caterpillar Autonomy.

It starts, like all good stories, with Caterpillar’s RTO (return to office) mandate and how it has affected a lot of people negatively (in my opinion). I haven’t seen one positive remark about it fromanyone making less than $250k a year + Bonus + Equity if you catch my drift…

I know of people who really did lose their jobs at the end of 2025 for refusing to move. My story with RTO is covered elsewhere, I’d been blessed with remote work and was even secure in a remote position in the face of Caterpillar being willing to fire me After Exceeding Expectations For 4 Years.

But time passes and life happens, and the sovereign Lord brought me to this current circumstance: where I’m fully committed to Caterpillar Autonomy, and it feels weird to say it. I’m going to skip the RTO details, if you know you know. Where I’m at right now is on the other side (or very nearly on the other side) of a choice I didn’t feel freedom to make because it came from a conviction.

The manager of the group I’m in told me a story about working for another mining company, where he was managing mines in the Congo. These mines can be in the most remote of remote places on earth - in cultures where human life is definitely treated differently than in the first-world midwest USA. Operators of these huge mining trucks in these parts of the world can be smoking meth in the cabs - which obviously leads to unsafe operation. Safety of the mines themselves can be a second-thought as well, they collapse and then the people inside have to be excavated out. Sean told me he had come back to work after a weekend just to be told, as if it was no big deal, that “Motombu died” and to find another operator. Very crass attitude towards human life…

I’m still pretty frustrated at Caterpillar for how they’ve handled RTO (and corporitisms like “Caterpillar family” and “we bleed Cat yellow” are distracting nonsense), and part of me wants to leave still over the personal offence, but Caterpillar will make the safest mining equipment, without a doubt. And given that Cat will make the safest equipment then the story I was told and the mission I couldn’t help but believe in is that rolling out good autonomy software and solutions to these remote mines will save lives.

Warning

I’m obviously not like superman or anything, but something feels better about enabling good autonomy rather than supporting an online sales platform, or working for a bank…

I was invited (coerced?) into that mission - and my role in it is enabling the Autonomy group to manage data for their software stack. I get to help these engineers be experts in the things they’re experts in by offloading some operational overhead (data movement, pipelineing, infrastructure and devops, etc.) so that they can produce the best autonomy software on the planet.

New Job - Caterpillar Autonomy

2026-01-26T10:24:54Z

In I'm back from the dead I mentioned my new role that started this year - it’s a return to Caterpillar Autonomy. I built some data pipelines and junior-grade infrastructure 5 years ago but left over burn-out at the prospect of a job with smaller scoped work and more technical guidance. That was a good move, and in God’s sovereignty he’s brought me back. Now I’m looking at code, thankfully not that I wrote, but that the guy after me wrote - it accomplished a job, like my original work did, but also like what I built back then - there’s better ways today. The amount of things in front of me is absolutely daunting, and the people on the team have been seeded with a very high opinion of me… I don’t know how much is valid and how much is hype, but I’m gonna try to live up to it.

One way I’m striving to do that is to maximize my efficiency with the AI coding tools available to me. We have Github Copilot and I’ve picked up a lot over the course of the last few years (and especially more recently) in using agents, planning out work, documenting plans for agents to follow, splitting up work via worktrees, etc. I feel pretty good about where I’m going and someday I might even release Nexus. Nexus is serving as my second-brain at work, the hub where I collaborate with my fleet of agents on the work that must get done. Details to come on this, but the thing that matters is that in ironing out workflow I’ve moved from prompt + chat to really managing a long-lived stream of work. AI has been changing the world, and there’s been developer hype for years now. But “make me a cool app, no mistakes” isn’t going to cut it. Even “make an app but generate a plan first” isn’t going to cut it… Developers have to adopt a higher level role, a systems-oriented and architecture-driven worldview must become primary in order to keep up. Code-gen and syntax writing are not what developers were ever paid to do, although many believed so. Our jobs have been to solve problems and deliver code that solves the problem. The code is cheap now, but solving problems still is a human task.

In the Autonomy group - there’s problems all up and down the stack. My focus is on infrastructure and developer operations - it’s become my bread and butter over the last several years. I’m excited to help the team grow, and I’m excited to grow personally/technically as I lean into the agentic workflow to produce code that I’m actually proud of, that has my name on the commit, and that solves real problems.

Example - Local Development #

One of the first things I’m tackling is a developer-pain-point of working on their laptop. I’ve been in this space for years, mostly with python programmer who are writing data science code. They don’t know about virtual environments, checking $PATH, assuming bad state in their terminal session, how to configure VS Code, etc. Often they just want to write some scripts and somehow test it. The solution I see most often is for devs to write code in JupyterLab/Notebooks in AWS or some environment close to their data - this is fine I guess, but it’s not developing good pipelines, and it’s tedious as hell. In my last job I helped set developers up with workflows that allowed them to run their IDE of choice locally (getting all the goodies of syntax highlighting, LSP, etc) and a CLI that took their code and ran it in the cloud, right next to data, in the same way that prod runs. It was a hit. After that I introduced some tools to help them manage python environments - we had strict templating requirements in our projects, so making tools to automate those things wasn’t too hard - it’s much easier than trying to make something flexible for every use case. The opinions made the automation and tooling easy to make and distribute.

Well I’m up against a similar task now, but oh so much worse… Larger team, larger environment sprawl, larger infrastructure mismanagement, the whole gambit. And I’m here for it… Here’s the first problem I’m addressing - local development for Airflow DAGs that run in an Airflow deployment on Kubernetes. The deployment itself is a little odd, Airflow is an orchestrator, all the pipelines run in external AWS Batch jobs - so a DAG hits the Batch API to run the code. The design there is actually nice, but how are devs testing code?

Oh that’s easy… they SSH into the prod server, which is a 5 year old desktop THAT I BUILT WITH A CO-WORKER BEFORE I WAS IN AUTONOMY THE FIRST TIME… hold on, WHAT!? Yes, it’s true.. so they SSH into the prod server, run some bash scripts in their userspace that setup airflow and a few db utilities in a docker compose stack, authenticate with AWS themselves from that server, and then they run DAGs against real data to test it… I am beyond shook.

Here’s what I’ve put together - a bootstrap process (I like just + PEP 723 python scripts as opposed to bash, but to each their own, and bash of course has its place) that spins up a kind cluster on their laptop, the process pulls some private images and loads them into the kind cluster, it installs airflow from a helm chart (the same helm chart we’ll use in dev and prod… no more docker compose over here, kubectl over there), and everything just. comes. up. No SSH into ancient server, no touching cloud infra (they get MinIO and a DB container to emulate S3 and RDS in our AWS accounts), no sweat on testing DAGs. They stage some data in MinIO (just open minio handles the port-forward and opens the browser), then just open airflow (their DAGs are hot-reloaded via hostPath mounting), and they can run DAGs locally until they’re satisfied with the results.

It’s taken me about a week of split-focused effort (I mentioned Nexus and I’ve been co-building and dogfooding that at the same time) but I’m proud of that local setup now. I am a bit shocked they’ve dealt with a brittle, hacky, often broken development workflow for the last 4 years or so, but that development I suppose.

The Point #

This post wasn’t meant to be me glazing myself for awesome local development practices, I am simply excited about this new chapter. I love solving problems, and I love owning those solutions. There’s a whole mess of things to address, my mind is buzzing, and I feel like God has blessed me with renewed passion (again see I'm back from the dead). I’ve given up some pay and some freedom to take this role, but I think it’ll pay dividends.

Life happens to all of us - this role change affected a lot for me, it’s been hard to digest some of those changes, but the work is good, the development is fun, the new world of using agents to fly through things you’re fluent in is exciting, and I’m here to help a team that desperately needs it to improve their lives and the work we do for Cat Autonomy.

I’m still pissed at Caterpillar Executives for RTO ruining parts of my life, but in God’s sovereignty their idiocy has led to non-trivial blessing, so I can say “Praise the Lord”

Work Compensation Note

2025-12-01T05:57:40Z

Work Compensation Notes #

Anthony asked me what I needed to be happy and I didn’t have a good answer, but I did ask for clarity on the chaos at work. I’ve thought more about it and I think I’ll just be honest with him. I have moon-lit in the past, exceeded expectations at Cat, and made double my salary. I don’t need to go back to that, but I want to ask him what he makes in total comp and what the horizon looks like for me at Cat. Not because I want prestige, but because I want to prioritize my family and if I can give financial freedom to them (and myself) much earlier than if I was solo-loyal to Cat, that’s a real thing I need to wrestle with. So my question for him will be how much of that gap can Cat close over time?