Mike Carbone

Last week marks six months since moving to NYC, so I figured it’s a good time for a check-in here.

Living in New York had never really been a dream of mine; growing up in Jersey it was never the unobtainium that others had made it out to be. I was here regularly, so the sitcoms or social media hype of it never really enticed me.

Indeed, rather the opposite. I didn’t know if I’d like it at all. The hustle and bustle, competitiveness, “chew you up and spit you out” culture always felt intimidating. How did I end up here?

Deciding On New York City

I wanted a good software job in tech with long-term career potential, one where I could go into the office and enjoy a social life after work.

That criteria instantly removed most US cities off the list. B-tier cities just didn’t cut it—for me, it wasn’t worth packing bags to move to a place like Chicago where I had no friends, no network, and no particular interest.

I was left with Philadelphia, San Francisco, Austin, or New York. (Maybe not-so-coincidentally, I have a sibling living in each of these cities except Philly.)

Philly: I have a great friend network and went to school there, but my options were pretty much work for Comcast or commute out to the suburbs. Everything feels smaller there. Limiting and an undersell of what I want from life. Nah.

San Francisco: I’ve visited a handful of times and while the tech culture is exciting, I find the monotony exhausting. The hyper-competitive status culture feels like I’m back in high school again with kids trying to flex their GPAs or honors classes, but now it’s Y-Combinator raising-more-than-you, highly transactional relationships that end when the downtown bars close at 9pm. Maybe not for me.

Austin: I was seriously interviewing and even flew down to look at apartments. I did an onsite interview and actually had a job offer. I was offered $135k salary (only $5k more than my previous full-time), and they wanted me to commute about 25 minutes north of the city (just north of the Domain area if you speak Austin). Boo. The culture is great. I really love that city. But I couldn’t justify a cross-country move, leaving friends and family behind for a career in a North Austin office park and a $5k raise. It wasn’t exciting and wasn’t for me.

That left one option: New York City. Not as much of a willing choice, but the result of a process of elimination.

Don’t get me wrong, the prospect had lots of benefits: close to family, great career opportunities, a diverse non-tech-based social life, and something completely new. A challenge. Could I make it here?

Life In The City

So here we are. Six months in. And yeah, wow, this city absolutely fucking rocks.

Career: the job is great. We’re a company of about 20 people, about 10 locals rotating through office days filling about 5 desks on an average day. Everyone is so smart, it’s the first time in my life where I fully trust the work of the people to my left and right. We solve hard problems, I’m able to lean into my strengths as an engineer, I can speak my mind and be heard. And we drink beers together after work from time to time. Can’t ask for more.

Ancillary to that, the wider New York City startup scene is tight. We’re humbled by the other huge industries around us in the city, so egos are kept under control. (Side note: you quickly learn that having ego is black sheep activity in this city. Good luck keeping friends if you think you’re the coolest in the room.) Founders and junior engineers rub shoulders on the subways, keeping the culture very down to Earth.

Friends: this didn’t come that easy; my first few months I was so locked-in at work that making friends was not a priority. Only after a few months did I start branching out socially. I’ve been able to join a great friend group, through the connection of a high school buddy. He introduced me to his friends, and the rest took care of itself. They’re a great group of guys.

I believe making friends is about being present and saying yes to things, but with that, I’ve had to learn to say no to other things that used to occupy my time. It’s been a sacrifice and an investment. But an important one. Part of this change has been saying goodbye to old things and welcoming new ones. Social time allocation remains an ongoing dilemma.

The City: never quiet. Truly the city that never sleeps through the endless opportunities to go to bars, restaurants, shows, parks, dating, friends, tech events, etc. Music is everywhere, usually jazz. The dominant hobby is drinking with friends and finding new spots to drink with friends.

Most days I don’t get home from the office until 7 or 8pm, from walking 35 minutes home up 7th avenue, then on my way popping into a store, sitting in the park or meeting up with someone. Cooking is impossible. Walking is the new working out.

Truly, I find walking the streets surrounded by these tall buildings oddly comforting. Like a warm blanket on a cold, gloomy day. I have the same feeling on the subway during my morning commute. It’s a warm feeling, and I love being surrounded by people all the time. Comfort is found in different, new places.

There is no quiet, there is no touching grass, but there is an array of cubes to look into at night across the street from my bedroom window, like a giant dollhouse, watching people end their days, lights going out one at a time as I play my guitar. Even when I’m alone, I’m not.

The money goes out as fast as it comes in. I’m great at multiplying my money through investments and have never been wealthier. Yet I also went into credit card debt for the first time.

Personally: the non-stop hustle is addicting; I’ve had to learn how to carve out time to relax and recharge. The stimulation has curbed my mind-wandering time, leading to a decline in ambition, creative thinking, and eagerness to build.

Even finding time to write this is the result of working to control stimulation a bit — deleting Instagram and X from my phone, cleaning out attention-grabbing mechanisms, pausing dating apps and reducing phone time. I use my phone to fill the gaps of time riding the subway or elevator, but I’m starting to learn that I need those gaps. They’re important downtimes in a city that has none.

Luckily the half-life of a diminished attention span is short and the sickness is quickly curable.

The Museum of the City of New York has these four words written in big text when you walk in, the four defining characteristics of New York City:

MONEY DENSITY DIVERSITY CREATIVITY

and I think I’ve experienced first-hand, in my own ways, what each of those mean.

It’s the greatest city on Earth. It exemplifies the best and worst of the human experience. It’s dirty, old, beautiful, and endlessly exciting. It has character. Limitless possibility.

I can’t wait for tomorrow, this upcoming week, or the next six months. Because what I know for certain is that I have no idea what’s coming.

Tuesday, February 4th, marks my first day as a Product Engineer at Knock, a software service company based out of New York City.

Knock powers notifications and customer engagement experiences for hundreds of big businesses like Vercel and Zapier. I’ll be employee number 23, working as a full-stack software engineer on the product team.

Honestly, I couldn’t be more excited.

By all of my measurements, this is a dream job: the product is obviously valuable to businesses and destined to grow, the team is friendly and talented, the office location in SoHo is perfect, the compensation is a record high for me, and the company is small enough for me to have significant impact (but not too small either).

I couldn’t come up with a better scenario than that! With such a perfect storm, I’m ready to deeply commit to growing Knock into a billion dollar company. I’m all in.

On top of that, I’ll be moving to NYC within a few weeks to work in-person with the co-founders each day, looking to foster the culture and use my past startup experience to drive this company forward with them.

This also marks the end of a drawn-out job search process, between creating my own job as founder of Hermae, to challenging interview cycles for dozens of tech companies across the country. Thank god it’s over! (And let me say — Knock was exceptional in this regard, from intro to verbal offer within seven days.) The search was another notch in a long year of transformation, and it undoubtedly made me a better engineer.

So, let’s. fucking. go! Knock all the way. It’s gonna be a fun ride.

Invest in Learning

I love learning new things, and I want to spend more time and money to keep pushing myself here. "Learning" is intentionally broad; I'm not sure how this will manifest, but if at the end of the year I can say I'm obviously more proficient in a new area, I'll consider this a success. Bonus addendum: something not directly related to tech.

Dive Deeper Into Finance

I'm pretty damn good at managing my money. I'm able to stretch a dollar further than anyone I know; not by being cheap, but through strategic investing. In fact, I just reached a big milestone: my investments are up 100% all-time, meaning I've doubled every dollar that I put into the market. Last year alone, I was up 48%. For those that don't know, this is huge! I was able to use the returns on these investments to fuel my food, traveling, and fun expenses.

This year, I want to get even better. I'd like to learn more about finance in general to see how I can maximize the returns on my investments. I also want to use my technical background to help me make better investment decisions, specifically by using quantitative measurements to identify undervalued companies ready to boom. Beyond that, I also want to create tooling to analyze the performance of individual trades, tax implications when selling, and more insightful measurements.

Move to New York City

A big mystery for me last year was the internal question where to next? I was torn between moving closer to friends in Philadelphia, moving closer to Austin, or maybe somewhere like San Francisco with a lot of career opportunity. After thinking deeply about this, I realized New York City was the only option that offered what I was looking for: good career opportunities, great social atmosphere, close to family, and energy. Yes, there's downsides like cost and lack of outdoor space for the summer, but I learned no place has everything I'm looking for. The city's life, vibrancy and opportunity will make the downsides more than worth it.

Gotta live in NYC at least once, right?

Watch More Movies In Theaters

Movies are so much fun. I should see more in theaters, always a great time.

Eat Better

I do intermittent fasting a lot... unintentionally. The "only coffee until 2pm" thing needs to stop, and I need to make a better effort at eating breakfast. Increase protein intake, especially as I'm working out.

Say Yes

It's easy to say no or make excuses to avoid doing things. It's harder to find the activation energy to get my butt up and out the door. I want to avoid declining the dragon:

Medieval knights used to wander around hoping for honorable adventures to pop up so that they could demonstrate their bravery. They were desperate for big, scary dragons to appear. When I put off doing the brave thing, I am declining the dragon: missing an opportunity to do something that might be scary in the moment but would ultimately make me feel great.

I wrote my resolutions down last year, and I'm really glad I did! It was fun to look back and see what I accomplished. I have a new set of resolutions for 2025, but before I post those, let's take a look back at last year's resolutions...

Connect More

Partially accomplished. I rekindled some old friendships and invested time into making new ones. I've learned that having friends is one of the best parts of my life, and I can't imagine my life without them. Staying connected with people takes work and effort. It doesn't come for free, but life is pretty gray without it.

At the same time, it's a treadmill that never stops. It's tough to stay in touch with everyone I consider a friend, especially when separated by distance. I'm hoping I can catch up with even more old friends next year (and if you think this is you, please reach out!)

Exercise More

Partially accomplished. I'm lifting weights pretty regularly again. To be honest, I was frustrated that I plateaued in progress earlier in the year and fell off my routine a few times. It took me until ~November to realize my body requires an extreme amount of daily protein, at least 150g and, ideally, over 200g when lifting regularly to sustain myself. That's a shitload of protein! But with that consumption, I don't feel as tired when lifting, and the gains keep coming. That feeling is addicting. We back.

Listen More

Partially accomplished. First, deleting apps from my phone was one of the best decisions I made. No Twitter, no Reddit, no LinkedIn, and barely any Instagram. If I want to use them, I have to physically move my body to my laptop (where they're significantly less addicting and habit-forming.) I can't recommend this enough. Not until I removed the apps did I realize I had this persistent nagging in my brain encouraging me to take my phone out. Conversations with friends and family became secondary to thinking about the next time I could take out my phone and scroll through junk just to feel like I was "all caught up". My attention span was totally fried.

No more. I substituted those apps with longer-form content like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal apps. I disabled notifications for almost every non-essential app, I muted group chats and cleaned up my home screen. It worked. My attention span is back. Not just better — totally reclaimed. Conversations and small-talk became interesting again. The world suddenly became a more interesting, less negative place.

Yes, this definitely helped my listening skills. For some reason I'm still really bad at remembering details exchanged in conversation. I don't really know how to improve this. For now I'm just admitting it's a weakness and staying aware of that.

Help More

Accomplished. Proud of myself for this one. I took on an engineering apprentice for 5 months meeting weekly, I hired former students to give them experience when building Hermae, I audited a neighbor's website for free, I volunteered to help run the senior show at Drexel, I listened to student pitches for their capstone projects, helped my sister with her coding classwork, and probably a few more things.

To reflect on this, it feels just okay. I don't think it feels as good as I had imagined it would when I added this to my resolution list. I think if there was a better feedback loop, e.g. hearing the impact of my help, it would feel better. Kinda don't get that too much, but that's alright.

Want Less

In hindsight, "wanting less" isn't a great goal, there's nuance to it. Instead, it's about wanting the right things...

Bad:

• New material things like a computer, phone, clothes, or new car

• "Bigger or better" versions of what I already have

• Difficult-to-achieve expectations

• More money

Good:

• Steady income

• Plenty of healthy food

• Fun experiences

• A comfortable living space

• Seeing friends regularly

• Meaningful family time

• A day-to-day routine mixed with spontaneity

• Healthy relationships

• Mental peace

• Physical health and fitness

2024 was a transformational year for me. Lots of high highs, too many low lows. A unique year that provided a lot of clarity when I needed it most. Looking back, I learned more about myself this year than in any other, and those lessons have already helped write the next chapter.

Cheers 2024, you'll be missed.

As I'm going through a transition period in my life, I think of this quote about decision-making:

"The success of a decision is determined by the ability to stick with it."

Or at least, that's my paraphrased version of a much more elegant essay by Ed Batista.

I, like many people, sometimes struggle with making a decision. And the higher the stakes, the harder it becomes to choose a path forward. This line of thinking above alleviates a lot of the pressure to choose the "right" decision. In fact, it rejects the notion of a "correct choice" entirely:

"Before we make any decision—particularly one that will be difficult to undo—we're understandably anxious and focused on identifying the "best" option because of the risk of being "wrong." But a by-product of that mindset is that we overemphasize the importance of the moment of choice itself and lose sight of the importance of everything that follows."

Batista argues that it's our determination to make the "right decision" that leads us to paralysis and away from agency and ownership. Which is true; we're often waiting for something to tip the scales beyond our doubts to persuade us in either direction. This won't always happen though, sometimes it's just up to us!

However, it's not the choice, but our actions that follow our choice that is most important. The more we work towards its success after the fact, the more likely we will feel that the decision was the "correct one".

Of course, I still try to make the best choice; I don't just surrender my decision-making process to blind commitment. Batista writes more wisdom about this, but to summarize, it's our own reasoning and emotions that can help guide us to a successful decision.

Emotions serve as an evolutionary way for our body to predict the future. We associate experiences with positive and negative emotions, and when an image of that experience appears again, our learned emotional response will trigger and help us remember, or predict, the outcomes, which in turn helps us make better decisions.

"It invokes the concept of situational awareness--knowing what has gone before, what is happening now, anticipating what is coming, and then having one's cognitive engine in the right gear"

With that point in mind, I think it's important to regulate emotions too. If that emotional volume is turned up to 100, it overpowers logic and reasoning (the other half of the decision-making process) and leads to impulsive, spiraling behavior (and bad decisions). Through emotional regulation, we can reason to understand which emotions to ignore and which to pay attention to, further increasing the odds of a successful decision.

Emotions are not always accurate though. They can blind us. That's when we need to challenge what we feel and whether it to be true, again letting logic and reasoning hold weight in the decision-making process...

"Emotions can obviously mislead us and undermine the reasoning process [...] It is likely that when our emotions interfere with reasoning rather than support it, this is due to inaccurate or irrational associations made during our formative years."

It's all about balance.

So, when I face a difficult decision, whether that's walking away from a problematic relationship, switching jobs, or moving cities, I listen to what I'm feeling, challenge those feelings with logic and reasoning, then commit to whatever it is I choose, knowing success is not automatic, but worked for. Or, in a more concise way of putting it...

“When you come to a fork in the road, take it” - Yogi Berra