not another new year new me post

okay so i know i said i was going to start a new email format so you can read it better etc etc but this post is less torc related. like most of us, the community team has been more on break to rest up before hitting the ground running in Q1. so I wanted to take a second to talk about….

imposter syndrome.

looking back on 2024 made me look back even further since 2020. because in 2020 my entire career split into a whole other path. i took the jump from being a traditional ‘heads down recruiter’ to starting this journey into a community role and looking back on it I have learned SO MUCH. so I wanted to let you know that if you feel like you very ‘imposter syndrome-y’ I can tell you that you are doing EXACTLY what you need to be doing.

so if you don’t read anymore of this jibber jabber just know, that the biggest growth happens when you are questioning yourself the most.

i saw in 2020 that the entire recruiting game was changing. my original focus was recruiting engineers JUST in nashville. still, I saw that the industry was shifting to a fully remote/distributed workforce so I knew I had to start reaching engineers across the country ‘at scale’. to tell you how much of a fundamental shift this was, my entire day consisted of cold calling and cold dm’ing every engineer in nashville BEGGING them to meet with me. i knew this was not sustainable in the long run.

so I started streaming to reach the masses which is what has become guidance counselor 2.0.

another thing that was drilled into my head early in my recruiting career was to find engineers that were ‘not on the job boards’ because the thought is they were already called by every recruiter, and we needed to find ‘the 111A’s’ (for all my vaco people you know what that means) but this means the best of the best engineers. well I realized that those engineers were also being hit up on the world’s largest recruiting platform…linkedin so I knew I had to go somewhere else. that is when I went to twitter, slack, discord, and these other channels that no one was talking about.

i essentially went with THE GOAT gary vaynerchuck’s advice about ‘underpriced attention’ in that I need to be where your competitors ARENT. i also realized that very few recruiters/recruiting firms were at code conferences let alone actually SPEAKING at them. again, the common theme of my career is going where the people ARENT. aka underpriced attention.

mind you, during this entire career shift, I had a TON of haters. and I hate to even say this but I want to bring this up because I felt crazy and other people were talking behind my back that I was crazy (people came out a few years later and admitted to it hence why I can say this). again, my biggest advice for folks. if you are passionate about a dream…keep at it!!

probably one of the biggest gut punches that made me question everything was a complicated let go/stepping away from the company I started my career at after 11 years! this made me question my entire decision to go full-time into the content/community recruiting approach. on top of this, I took a 40% pay cut for about two years. because I moved into a space that wasn’t a traditional recruiting commission model and I struggled to find a comp model that worked for me.

i had a convo with my wife about a year ago. in this convo she was very nice about this statement but she just said facts, she said ‘you know the moment you got into social media you took a paycut maybe it’s time to go back into traditional recruiting’. and this hit me like a pile of bricks. at this point I started to ask a lot of my engineering friends I trusted in the community if I should just go back to being a recruiter and everyone answered with a resounding…

no.

then after never finding a true fit in my last position, I was back on the job search AGAIN and really doubting if this was a true career path for me but deep down I started to see the trend of ‘community/growth’ opportunities starting to pop up on the internet so I KNEW I was onto something.

now at the end of 2024, i can truly say I have my dream role at torc.dev where my role is to head up all community for engineers across the globe. it terms of compensation, I feel like i’m finally getting compensated the way I should be compensated and having the whole backing of the c-suite and organization is a dream come true.

looking back on the last four years of my career it’s been a journey and a journey I would not change. sometimes it’s hard to see where you’re heading at times but if you have the conviction and determination, I promise, it will all work out.

here’s to an unbelievable 2025.

-taylor