A Year at Igalia
March 11th marked my one year anniversary at Igalia. It simultaneously feels like the blink of an eye and also decade. I suspect that's just the way life goes.
It has been a busy year of rebuilding my self-confidence in my career. Despite it being 2 years since relocating to Berlin and being laid off, I am still mending the trauma of 2023, and working at Igalia has been instrumental in that. Igalia is proof to me that you can have a fulfilling life both in and outside of work and that your work can support and encourage you having that life outside work. A concept foreign to the American mind. The longer I'm outside America, the more radicalized about work, time off and healthcare access I become, but perhaps that's a different blog post.
A flat structure, co-op, where everyone has a say and works together in a democratic way seems to give me more of a sense of purpose in my work at this point in my life. You're not lining the pockets of a CEO who is going to make more in his yearly bonus than you will ever see in your bank account in your lifetime.
I am not left feeling inadequate because I didn't create enough business impact or visibility for the work I'm doing. "You did great, and you're a great worker, but you're not visible enough, so your bonus is going to be a fraction of what it could be." Yep, that happened to me.
It is not a competition and there are no political games like in big corporate. There are politics, because everything is political, despite what some would tell you, but I find they are healthy conversations about doing things for the good of the company and the individuals in them.
I still have moments of imposter syndrome. I am not an engineer, and I will most likely never be an engineer, despite the never-ending nagging voice in my head telling me to take a course for X engineering language. I am a designer, and I am product manager with a continually growing understanding of the web platform. Happily, I have been able to put all of those different skills to use in the last year.
I firmly believe companies like Igalia are vital to a healthy technological ecosystem that continues to evolve. Especially when it comes to the web platform (but that focus might just be because that's what I have the most experience with). If we relied on browser vendors to be the only ones working on web platform features, I don't believe we would have the number of features we have today. Igalia works on so many things for the web platform (here are some examples from 2020) and I am proud of the work we do.
Big questions #
I've been introduced to big questions in the last year about technology and funding. I'm still nervous about the web and our reliance on big tech to package their browsers for "free" as our primary way to access the internet.
I question the way we are shoving AI into every single product possible and not questioning the ethical and environmental concerns. But I also understand why so many individuals are trying to sell their AI products and cash in. The cost of living is rising, while salaries and wages are not.
These big questions come at a time when I'm having an existential crisis about America and the world and systems we have in place. Everything is interconnected, and I work in tech, so I feel hyperaware in the ways in which everything is connected and the ways in which tech influences our world.
I'm also in an environment where it feels safe to ask ethical questions. Do I have answers to these things that I'm pondering? No. But I'd like to the leave the world better than I found it, and I feel like I'm in a place to do that and these big questions are a way to start the conversation.
