Warmth Is Not A Yes

In March, I said in a Discord channel that I needed a job.

A senior engineer I had never spoken to went and found my GitHub. He dug through it himself, surfaced a pull request I had made to Lexical, Meta's open-source text editor, and came back to tell me the PR demonstrated an impressive set of qualities. He looked at my zero-knowledge work and said he loved it.

A senior engineer with nothing to gain went out of his way to read my code and tell me it was good.

So I built something on it. That was March.

The maybe

He did not ignore me. That is the part I keep having to explain to myself.

For weeks, we actually talked. Not small talk either. He was deep in what he was building, and he brought me into it, and we went back and forth about agents, about how you get a machine to hold a large architecture, about what a person is, even for once, the implementation stops being the hard part. Some of the best conversations I had this year. I would learn something, go away and chew on it, and come back with a better question.

The rhythm was slow. We would talk for a week, he would go under to work, and he would surface the next week. That was just how it went, and I liked how it went.

Then I reminded him what I actually wanted. A job. A foot in the door of a room I have been standing outside of for a while now.

And he asked me a question back. "In life, why do you want what you want."

I was starstruck. A man whose work I respected had stopped and asked me a question nobody has ever asked me. I answered as well as I could. I took my time with it. I meant every word.

That was the 2nd of May. That was the last time he spoke to me in the DMs.

Here is what I did not understand for a long while, and it is the thing that makes this different from being ignored. A week of quiet was normal for us. Two, sometimes. So the silence after May felt exactly like every other gap we'd had, the kind he always came back from. Nothing about it felt like an ending. It just felt like another week where he was heads down and I'd hear from him soon.

By the time I could tell the difference it had already been most of a month, and I had already started counting. Sixteen days. Then eighteen, and I remember thinking eighteen was the number where I would do something, and I did not. At twenty-one days he put a fire emoji and a hundred emoji on a post (on a public channel) of mine about using his packages, and that was enough. Twenty-one days of nothing plus two emojis, and I told myself it was moving.

Then almost a month, and I decided that if it hit a full month I would text him.

Then, on the 8th of July, he answered a question I asked in the channel, not the DMs. And it was a good answer, the kind you read and read again. He said juniors who only implement are competing with a coding agent now and losing, because five seniors can architect a thing and hand it to a machine rather than explain it twice to a person. He said the way out is upward. Critical thinking. Cross-cutting features. Being the man who can hold the whole system in his head instead of the man who closes the ticket.

I have taken that advice seriously. I am still taking it seriously. It was good advice, freely given, to a stranger, in public. He owed me none of it.

But look at what it did. Every single time the hope was about to die of natural causes, something small showed up and reset the clock. Never enough to be an answer. Always enough to be a reason to wait.

The thing that held me was never the yes. It was maybe.

And because the last thing he ever said to me was a question, I have spent the time since May marking my own paper. Turning my answer over. Wondering which part of it lost him. Whether I sounded hungry in the wrong way, or soft, or like a kid. You cannot appeal a verdict nobody delivered, so instead you just keep re-reading your own submission at 1 a.m., looking for the sentence that did it.

Most likely, there was no test. Most likely, a man asked an interesting question on a Friday, then got a new office, a new workstation, a life with responsibilities, and I became one of multiple people who were mid-conversation with him when the tide went out.

But I would rather believe I failed than that I did not matter enough to warrant a reply, because failing is something I can fix. That is the trade I have been making with myself for two and a half months, quietly, without admitting I was making one.

What the 'maybe' cost

Around April, I was in an arrangement with someone that had gone bad. He had helped me start something, and once it started working, he decided he wanted a cut. He had connections he was happy to remind me of, and he sized up what I was making to work out how much respect I had earned. I knew exactly what it was. I said nothing. I ate it.

I ate it because I was waiting. Any week now, the thing with the senior engineer would firm up into something recurring, and then I could walk away clean and never explain myself.

There was no offer. There was never an offer. There was a man who was just generous with his opinion of my code.

I told my mother recently that I didn't come to this world to be sucking epon. She asked me what it meant, which is its own kind of comedy, and I had to sit there and explain to my own mother that it means grovelling, debasing yourself, doing degrading things to survive. I was very sure of myself when I said it. Meanwhile I'd spent months eating disrespect from this someone because a job that didn't exist was going to save me from having to open my mouth.

So that's the real bill. Not the unanswered DMs. The DMs cost me nothing but sleep. The maybe cost me my mouth.

That is the real bill. Not the unanswered DMs. The DMs cost me nothing but sleep. The maybe cost me my mouth.

And in May, Citu died. The startup I had joined unpaid and stayed at on a salary just ended, and the thing standing between me and doing something serious about that was one man's inbox.

The work was not the mistake

I need to be exact here because there is a version of this where I beat myself up for the wrong crime.

I wasn't sitting in a room manifesting. From March to July, I worked. I went through his packages properly and used them for something real. I found actual bugs. I wrote up a proposal for a new package. I spent some time building Verity, a proof chain registry, taking the shape and inspiration from one of his projects, and threw it at the Sui Overflow hackathon. Verity is in my portfolio.

The work stands. The work is the only part of this that is fully mine.

But I should be honest about who I was building for, because otherwise that paragraph is just me defending myself. Some of that work was aimed. I did not build off his project because it was the most interesting problem in the world. I built off it because he wrote it, and I wanted him to see. Which isn't shameful. It's just true.

The building was right. The calendar was wrong. I let a man who had never once said yes to me decide what my next three to four months looked like.

The same shape, before the code

I have done this before, and the last time it had nothing to do with software.

There's this beautiful lady. We talked for about six weeks. The kind of thing where you look up and it is 2am and you have not opened another app all night. We went out once, cinema and then food, and it was good.

She told me she had come out of something that hurt her, and she moved carefully because of it. When I brought any flirty energy she let it pass. She would just avoid it.

So I asked her straight, because I would rather know than guess. She said she wanted it slow and respectful.

That was the answer. The whole answer was sitting right there, so to speak, and I did not take it. I decided it was a "not yet", which is a thing I always do.

So I sat in it. Got frustrated. Went five days without saying anything, which is its own kind of message. Then sent a closing message.

And she told me the feelings were real.

And it fixed nothing. Because by then I had already worked out that the dynamic was not for me, so I finally got the confirmation I had been chasing for six weeks. What I wanted was never the feelings. What I wanted was a yes at my pace. She never gave me that. She also never once pretended she was going to.

Six weeks of that. And I did the identical thing to a man in a Discord server. Different room, same me.

The rule

Warmth is not a yes.

Attention is not a yes. A fire emoji is not a yes. A stranger reading your GitHub is not a yes. A long, generous answer in a public channel is not a yes. Cinema and 2am gist and confirmed feelings are not a yes. All of it can be completely genuine and mean nothing whatsoever about whether the door opens, because the door is a separate thing and it requires a separate word.

Only a yes is a yes. Everything else is a no until it isn't.

I used to think my problem was hoping too much. It isn't. Hope is fine. Hope is what gets me up on the mornings when nothing has landed, and the account is looking at me funny. Hope is fuel, and I am not giving it up.

Hope just isn't evidence.

Hope isn't a liar. It's just a bad reader.

Something happens that could mean two things, and hope quietly picks the one you needed. He read my code. What that meant was he liked my question. What I heard was that he was considering me. She laughed at my jokes. What that meant was she enjoyed my company. What I heard was that she was warming up.

Nothing was made up. Nobody misled me. I just kept choosing the kinder of the two readings, every time.

So the rule is not to stop hoping. The rule is to stop treating hope as confirmation. It isn't proof of anything.

Hope while you move. Just don't move because you hoped.

Not pessimism

There is one line I wrote down last week in anger, and I want to kill it here before it takes root.

I wrote: if something can go wrong, it may as well go wrong.

A man who expects everything to fail does not send the next message, does not enter the next hackathon, does not build the next thing. He arranges his life so he is never in a position to be told no, and then calls the arrangement wisdom. I've met that man. I am not going to be him.

The real version is smaller and harder. Expect the no. Prepare for the no and swing anyway.

Move like a man and not like a boy who thinks that saying he wants something is the same as earning it. Nobody is handing anything over because I was patient, or because I was polite, or because I wanted it more than the next person did.

So I keep the discipline. I keep the faith, which is a different animal entirely from the fantasy, and I am learning the difference the slow way. I move on many fronts at once so that no single silence can ever freeze me again. I keep building because it is the only part of any of this that I have control over.

Why I want what I want

He asked me that in May, and I have been answering him ever since, so here is what I actually sent him, unedited, before I knew it was the last thing I would ever say to him.

I have seen firsthand how people around me limit themselves because of things they generally do not have control over, and also because they have these limiting beliefs about what they could have or become. I want what I want because I refuse to accept those limits for myself. And on the work side of things, I want to be in an environment where the technical bar is high enough that I'm genuinely growing as an engineer. I don't want to stay in environments where I'm not growing. I've seen how easy it is to get stuck doing surface-level work, and I don't want that for myself.

I have read that back more times than I want to admit. Looking for the crack. Deciding it was too earnest, then that it was not earnest enough, then that the second half sounded like a cover letter, then that the first half sounded like a TED talk.

It's a good answer. It's still my answer. I would send it again today and change nothing.

So the answer was never the problem. There was nothing wrong with it.

I've spent ten weeks taking that apart looking for a fault it doesn't have, and the whole time the explanation was sitting right there in his own words. New office. New workstation. Settling in still. The man got busy.

That's it. That's the whole story, and it's hard to take because there's so little of it. Nothing happened. No decision got made in a room somewhere with my name on it.

Honestly, I'd rather have failed. Failing means there was a bar, and a bar is something I can train for. But nobody was measuring me. Everything I built between May and now was me proving a point to a man who never asked for one.

Except that same fact is also the way out. If nobody was measuring me, nobody turned me down. There isn't some bad opinion of me sitting in his head. Nothing to fix, nothing to prove. I can go and do something else.

The answer holds either way, though. I refuse to accept those limits for myself. I wrote it in May to impress a man who'd already stopped replying. It's still true in July with him gone. I believed it before he showed up, and I believe it now that he's left.

It is not over till it's over.

But until somebody says yes, I am calling it a no. And I'll be alright either way.