A very short goodbye post

And some archival photography

A few weeks after I started working at Medium, I had to fly to San Francisco for the launch of something called “The Partner Program.” I lived in Brooklyn, and—aside from my interview day, during which I sat in a room as seven staff members walked in consecutively to grill me or just shoot the shit with me, depending on how seriously they took their jobs (also some of them were wearing actual pajamas)—I’d never really been to San Francisco. I also hadn’t spent much time with the team IRL. We were a fully in-person company at that point, and the four (?) of us who worked remotely were viewed as oddly privileged rulebreakers. It was like we’d been given a hall pass… forever? By Ev, personally? Or something? It was a strange time, but an exhilarating one for me. I’d been writing on Medium since 2013. I joined in 2017. For my first week or so, because I was a total fan and had to express that somehow, my Slack status was a green heart (this was before claps; we had green hearts, aka “Recommends” then, as a way to show appreciation for posts. And that will be the last time I educate anyone about Medium history, hopefully.)

Anyway, I flew out to San Francisco for the launch of this program. I stayed at Hotel G (haunted) on Geary Street with the other remote-ees. And the next morning, I walked to our triangle-shaped office in the Phelan Building (the Flatiron Building of SF). After making my way through keyless entry, I stood in a small alcove near the door, intimidated by the faraway sounds of my Very Smart Coworkers Who Had Fancy Jobs Like Designer (Artist) And Engineer (Way Smarter Than I’ll Ever Be, Logically). I was so nervous and overwhelmed by that first-day-of-school feeling that I swiftly shut myself in a closet-sized conference room and pretended to do things on my laptop for a solid 30 minutes.

Eventually someone found me.

“Um… are you Harris??? From Slack?”

I stayed at that company for eight years.

My jobs were legion. There was a period of time when our logged-out homepage was a gigantic array of post previews, New York Times-homepage style, and I had to program them manually at least once a day including weekends. That was actually fun. A friend visited me from out of town and found me on a Sunday in a coffee shop, doing the homepage. For a while, I was a UX writer, then a human-in-the-loop on an ML curation team. What else? I cold-emailed thousands of writers asking them all kinds of things, but mostly: Do you want to write on Medium? Because you should. Some of those writers became friends. Some of them became iPhone favorites. Some of them became emergency contacts. A lot of what I did was read. We have a metric internally that displays how many hours someone has spent reading Medium posts, and :: checks backend :: I have been reading for a total of 314,337 minutes. That’s 7.18 months of 24/7 reading. “Your brain is basically all Medium now, how does that feel?” a friend asked me a few years in. And I was like, “feels fine!”

I’m the type to go hard when I get a job. Maybe too hard, I don’t know, but I do think life is seasonal, and there are periods when you really need to just run face-first into something… followed by periods when you need to not. I also believe the rewards of going full-throttle are hard to come by if you just coast, or even if you diligently plug away from 9 to 6 like a sane person. Most of those rewards, for me, are relationships. Relationships formed around things you actually create together—especially if those things were annoying, with lots of weirdness and ambiguity and uncertainty and tense Slacks involved—are stronger than relationships formed around, I don’t know, a shared enjoyment of the show Severance. Even though Severance is good, and I’m sure those actors will be bonded for life.

A few thank-yous (non-comprehensive)…

Steph G: Thank you for teaching me how to do this job (without ever explicitly teaching me anything).

Scott: Thank you for being calm no matter what, while also somehow having fun no matter what (rare).

Adeline: Thank you for being so wise and funny at the same time.

Alex and Megan: Thank you for making SF feel like a second home, and for all the after-hours career counseling.

Sophia C: Thank you for being yourself and for helping people around you be more of themselves, too.

Ev and Tony: Thank you for making this thing and making sure it doesn’t die.

Today is, weirdly, my last day working at Medium. I’m going to do some other stuff with my life, because it’s been eight years almost to the day and I feel it is Time. Thank you for pouring your words into this platform so I, holed up in my studio apartment with takeout ramen or tea or pasta I cooked, could read them. ❤️