When I embarked upon my job search, I contemplated what was most important to me in a job. I distilled it down into three must-haves for my future job:

1) A sane commute. No more hour-plus commutes, allowing multiple transit systems to potentially ruin my day.

2) Warm and friendly coworkers.

3) Good compensation

It's a pretty reasonable requirements list. I primarily applied to companies with management jobs (good $$$) here in San Francisco (good commute) with companies that were known to have a great culture (friendly!).  This was shaping up to be a pretty good process.

In the middle of this effort an old co-worker reached out to me and talked about an opportunity at the venture capital firm she works at. This would be a part-time job that might only last a few months (strike 1) taking place a couple of train rides away (strike 2) working with a bunch of venture capitalists (strike 3). I immediately rejected the notion but thanked her for thinking of me.

That was on a Friday. I spent much of that weekend thinking about how interesting this job was compared to all the other jobs I was looking at, which appeared to just be different flavors of the same thing. Did I want to manage engineers fixing bugs in education software? Or did I want to manage engineers fixing bugs in real estate software? Or did I want to manage engineers fixing bugs in human resources software?

All those other jobs were numbingly similar. This job at a venture capital firm was the one interesting one.

So, I took it. I violated all my rules. On the plus side, my title appears to be "Entrepreneur in Residence" which is baffling and pretentious and totally inapplicable to what I do there. Apparently they often call this role an EIR, so the "E" doesn't have to stand for Entrepreneur. It could stand "Engineer" or "Executive".

In this case maybe it means Experiment in Residence. Cross your fingers for me.