A letter to Max Part 1

This blog post is a letter to Max, my cousin who is now starting his adulthood graduating from high school. It's meant to be sort of a brief biography meant to give Max a peek into how his future might look as a young male vietnamese adult.

Getting to know ya ... a Van Phung male from Tuan to Dat ...

I thought I'd sort of walk backwards in time through me. I'm sure you guys already know but In about a month I'm going to be expecting my first child. I'm sure this is going to change me in a huge way as a person. I mean, just 10 years ago I was 19 years old enjoying my first year in College. Come to think of it, that was the age I was when I first met Jessica at Western. Boy how time flies. Sometimes I think how life would be different if I would have picked a college out of state or if I would have picked a different major in College. My current most favorite hobbies in terms of time spent these days is World of Warcraft (massively multiplayer online game), playing my accoustic Guitar, and hanging out with my family and friends. In the world of warcraft I have a level 80 death knight as an Avatar to a mythical and tactical gaming world. I've been playing guitar off and on for a few years now, I actually got started playing guitar by having a guitar given to me by Uncle Lucky (your dad Tuan). Early last year I decided I wanted to be a bit more serious and play more of these guitar chords and songs that I started learning from youtube and stuff. Me and Quan are actually learning some songs together. Our current favorite song to jam out on our Acoustics is "Tonic - If you could only see" ...

This April will complete my third year at Amazon.com. My official title is Software Developer Engineer 1 but much like clothing and shoes, that title can mean different things in different places. Working at Amazon has been a truly unique experience. The culture there touts customer centric work, frugality, and in terms of software engineering; a very high bar. Jeff Bezos has lead a truly successful customer centric shopping experience which has resulted in a business so large that data processing systems operate on very very high volume data. The environment is very competitive and there are times where I yearn for being a bigger fish at a smaller pond, but at least the time that I have already spent here at Amazon has already toughened my skin and has made me a more abstract thinker in terms of Software Programming. Operating on big datasets in software and working on systems that have very large code bases (thousands of lines of code) I think is what defines the difference between a Programmer and a Software Engineer.

So I currently work at Amazon but it could have turned out differently. When I first graduated from College at Western (Bellingham WA), it was 2002 and the American economy was experiencing a tech bubble burst. What does that mean? People over estimated the demand for software and technology so that artificial demand created an over abundance of technical folks. What did that mean for me in 2002? It was really hard to find a job. I spent a bit of time testing XBox and answering phones for Microsoft before seeking out Northrop Grumman at a job conference in Seattle. In 2002, although the bubble burst, some industries were still demanding technical talent. One of those industries was Defense. So after flying down to Southern California for interviews, I took a job as Systems Engineer at Northrop Grumman Azusa. I felt very lucky actually, to get a job in a time when the market for my field was so bad. I think at the time, I got hired in to make close to what Mr. Luong Dang was making =P In any case, Jess came down a short while after to join me. After two and a half years down in Cali, work in Defense was good. I had friends that were hopping around at Defense companies getting pay raises of 20-30%!!

After two and a half years of working at Northrop, alas Jess and I realized that we really missed our Nuclear families. So at that point we decided to move back to Washington, job or no job. Fortunately on the day Jess and I were packing up the U-Haul to head up from California to WA, we both got calls responding to job searches. Jess started teaching 8th grade science in Puyallup and I got a job at Cingular Wireless (now AT&T). In 2006 Jess and I were up in WA again when we had our wonderful wedding and our first home purchase.

I haven't even talked about my education yet and ... Phew, that's quite a bit! And there's still just so much more. But I think I'll stop here for now. I think this may be a good starter for in DEPTH conversation about how our lives turned out looking back on things. Hind sight is 20/20, but only if you look. I think learning more about how your cousins decisions influenced their lives can help you shape yours going forward Tuan.

I hope this email thread can turn into replies and responses with discussions that are imbued with excerpts of decisions made in our lives that can help you in yours. I hope that there are tidbits that you can gleam a path ahead that you see fit. Or maybe you find that letting life come to you is something that your cousins are actually doing and that this is what you want to do too.

Cheerz, Van Phung male # 4.1

Q