Leaving Monsanto, which became Bayer
Three years building software for plant science, and the friends who made it worth showing up for.
For three years I built internal software at an agriculture-science company, the kind of place where the thing your code touches is, improbably, alive. It was Monsanto while I was there and Bayer by the time I left.
I got unexpectedly fascinated by the work happening in the greenhouses, and my favorite project was Nurture, an inventory system for keeping track of plants. There is something quietly satisfying about software that helps keep real, growing things organized.
The friends are what I keep. Praneeth, Vernan, Erin, Jessica, and a whole bunch of others who made the ordinary days good ones. You don’t always get to choose your coworkers. I got lucky with these.
I am leaving for a better offer in healthcare, but I am leaving a lot of good people behind, which is the hard part of every one of these. It always is.