Earlier this summer, I was laid off from Wattpad after 13 years. I was part of a larger reduction in Engineering that included several other senior, long-tenured people.
It was not the ending I expected. When you spend that much time in one place, the work becomes tangled up with the people, the routines, the product, and all the small things that make a job feel like home. It becomes part of your identity.
I am proud of what we built.
When I joined Wattpad, I was the first full-time web engineering hire. Our daily standup included the entire engineering department. We had roughly four Git repositories. You could remember by name which EC2 instance tended to be the flaky one, and everyone knew what everyone else was working on.
By the time I left, the product and company had grown substantially. The team had contracted a couple of times too, as these things go. The complexity grew. Funding rounds came and went. We were acquired, which made for one of the more exciting COVID-era Zoom meetings, and later became part of a public company under WEBTOON Entertainment. ‘Change’ is probably the most honest summary of those 13 years.
Over the years, I got to work on products used by hundreds of millions of readers and writers around the world. I worked with people who cared deeply about users, craft, shipping well, and making Wattpad better one release at a time.
Some of the work was big and visible. Much of what I valued most was quieter: improving systems, raising the bar, mentoring, debugging the weird stuff, and trying to leave things better than I found them.
The unfinished work is still the hardest part. I had projects and initiatives in flight, along with a long list of improvements I still wanted to make. When you invest in a product and a team for that long, you do not stop caring just because your role ends.
Before I joined Wattpad, Allen and Ivan asked me a variation of this question during my interviews: “What would cause you to leave Wattpad?”
I told them I would leave when I was no longer learning or growing, and the work started to feel repetitive. I was pleasantly surprised that day never came. Even after 13 years, there were still new problems to solve and new things I wanted to learn.
Mostly, though, I feel grateful. Grateful for the people I learned from, the people I got to support, and the chance to spend such a meaningful part of my career working on a product that mattered to so many people.
Now I am figuring out what comes next. I know I do my best work with product-minded engineering teams where the user experience, technical quality, and strong delivery all matter. I am looking for Staff or Principal product engineering work where I can stay close to users and the product while helping teams solve difficult problems and ship well. If that sounds like your team, I would be happy to talk.
To everyone I worked with at Wattpad: thank you. It was a hell of a run, and I am better at what I do because I got to do it with you.
