My name is (Mike) Poage

If I had summarize my first 10 years of professional experience, I would probably say something like:

That might sound a little melodramatic, and perhaps you’re right. But let me just bullet out some of what’s gone down:

• May 2013 - Started off at an unpaid film internship at a place that shot product videos for people who auditioned for Shark Tank and training videos for lawyers. Shocker, that doesn’t pay the bills well.

• October 2013 - Got a job as technical recruiter, quickly hated life trying to find developers that were willing to take on a 2 month contract, no possibility of extension, in rural Virginia for 15% below market rate. the one silver lining of this was, I started to learn more about what coding was and decided I was going to study and attend a Developer Bootcamp in order to change careers. Although I was accepted into one, I had to defer my enrollment because I did not have $15K on hand to spend.

• August 2014 - As fate would have it, I didn’t need a bootcamp after all! I landed my first job in tech working at Teachable, where I was the startup equivalent of a Production Assistant. I was running our marketing site, answering emails/support, fixing goofy bugs no one else wanted to tackle. The pay was decent and we had the Area 51 arcade cabinet in the break room. I was also employee #5 so it was a very small tight-nit group of folks.

• April 2020 - Fast forward 6 years and some change later, I’m now an Engineering Manager for a small team focusing on internal tooling, that quirky little startup grew to close to 200 people before being acquired. I now had enough cash to not worry about pesky problems like, “subway fare or McDouble for dinner?” Downside, this was at the start of Covid… so yeah things got weird overall.

• December 2021 - Eventually left my job at Teachable to take a bit of a gap year. Got married to my awesome wife Maddie. Took a shot at starting a fintech company, and subsequently learned that the startup capital needed and regulation are preeeetttty steep.

• August 2022 - Started interviewing for jobs again while I was living in Italy for a month, and eventually landed a role at Code Climate where I worked on their static analysis product, Quality. As someone who had used the tool since early on in their career, this was an awesome opportunity to work on tough technical problems and gain one of the most underrated skills a software developer can have…. working with legacy systems!

• May 2024 - After a couple of years and two wonderful twin girls later, I got the opportunity to move onto my next challenge working at Beehiiv, a platform that makes it easy for folks to start their own newsletters.

So now that you know a bit more about my background, you might be wondering:

Well here is where I tease you on what you can expect to hear from this newsletter:

• Stories from my life, some of the lessons I’ve learned navigating the world of Tech and being an NYC transplant

• Ideas and thoughts I’ve developed around management, leadership, and growing yourself in your career.

• Maybe the occasional review of sorts. As someone with a Film Studies degree, I find there is a distinct lack of content around stuff like Dogme 95 and Italian Neorealism, so will probably put down some thoughts on that. Also probably technology I guess.

• You Tell Me! Seriously, I would love if folks gave me feedback on what they would be interested in hearing. This is my life and it all feels boring to me, so if you read something you love or want to hear more about, shoot me a message or tweet in my socials.

So if this sounds like something you would be interested in, subscribe and learn more. If it sounds like something you won’t be interested in, why don’t you still subscribe and if you don’t love it just unsubscribe after a few weeks, I guarantee you won’t want to 😀