The call that changed Naveed Kakal's career back was not a recruiter, a counteroffer, or a moment of clarity in an airport. It was a prank. A guy from the ETECH service team reached out to his ex-colleague — by broad consensus the best prankster the company ever employed — because a bit this good needed a professional: a classic fake service call, with Kakal as the voice on the other end. He took the job. The bit worked. And somewhere in the laughing afterward, people who hadn't talked in a couple of years started talking, and what they found was mutual missing. Within months he was back on the payroll of the industry he thought he'd left for good. The best fake service call of his career turned out to be the realest one he ever took.
The itch
To understand why he left, you have to sit in 2014 with him. Eight years into what was, on paper, the same job — a job that had grown enormously in scope and still carried whatever invented title the small shop had handed him. He offers the honest disclaimer that this is "reinventing history with the benefit of hindsight a little bit," but the anxiety at the center of it he remembers exactly: does my experience translate? The career advice of that era was unanimous — move every year and a half or two, bump the salary, keep the résumé liquid. He'd done none of it. He was remote, traveling constantly, and what reads now as an adventure felt then like "a pathway to never being able to settle down." Was he a versatile engineer, or was he just good at laundry?
So he did the scary thing: he asked the market. Recruiters in 2014 came back with offers, and with something worth more than the offers — external confirmation that his strange bundle, technical depth plus user-facing fluency plus project management in one person, "was actually very valuable." Not conversationally valuable. Priced valuable. He left in September 2014.
A note for the archivists: the tape tells this ending wrong. The record shows two final commits on December 22, 2014, at 6:48 in the morning — "soil factor reports," then, sixty seconds later, "version" — which reads like a man saying a quiet goodbye to 8,700 revisions of his life. The truth, per the man: those are stale environments coughing up debris months after he'd already gone. History keeps a diary, but it needs a witness to read it honestly.
The flotilla
The destination was Centro, in Chicago — his first taste of bigger tech, which he's careful to size correctly: "Chicago medium tech, really nowhere near big tech, but still, the layers and politics were kinda a thing." They hired him off a checklist — Rails experience, pleasant to work with — and by his account didn't especially know what else they were getting. Neither, fully, did he. He walked in carrying the imposter syndrome of a self-taught industrial developer, a self-described "hack" who hadn't lived the best-practice liturgy of tests and reviews.
Two things happened at once, and their collision is the story. The first: he got genuinely better. "We had time to build properly," he says, even to "bike-shed a bit on things that didn't matter" — which drove the version of him that had spent a decade racing plant deadlines quietly insane, and also taught him something the plant deadlines never could: some problems really are better solved by taking a minute and being thoughtful. The craft installed. It stuck.
The second thing: he watched what a dozen careful engineers produce when nobody holds the single thread. "A dozen people's thoughtful little projects," he says, "just become a flotilla of blah." Every ship seaworthy; no fleet. At ETECH, decisions had been made alone and measured against one incorruptible axis — how badly will this week blow up? At Centro the axes were more numerous, more refined, and, he noticed, "more political and self-serving at times." Centro, he says now, is probably where he was quietly turned off democracy as an engineering operating system — the beginning of a benevolent-dictator conviction he's held, mostly without naming it, ever since.
The org chart, meanwhile, kept promoting him toward the truth. The imposter got made dev lead, then engineering manager, inside two years — the bundle shining through exactly as the recruiters had priced it. He could hold strategy with stakeholders and hold respect from developers on code, and that combination is rare enough that it gets a title whether you want one or not. That's how he learned he didn't want one. "I like people," he says — and he does, it's audible — "but I hate owning it as a manager." The people-problems, the ceremony, the inventory of other humans' frictions. Centro's greatest gift was self-knowledge with receipts: he wanted to be an IC. The market had validated his skills; the promotion had clarified his wants. The laundry industry's strange one-man bundle had finally understood itself.
The fake call and the real one
Then the prank, the reconnection, the talks with the old team. In March 2017 the tape picks him back up, and the re-entry is almost comically humble for a returning veteran: an annotation gem, rubocop cleanup, initializer housekeeping — a man wiping his feet at the door of his own house. A week into being back, he learned why the timing had been strange: the company had been sold. Kannegiesser, the German giant, had acquired ETECH — the fast attack boat suddenly had an aircraft carrier alongside, a story that deserves and will get its own case file. His old owner Joe Schult and his old boss Larry had brought him home just as the flag was changing.
The personal plan changed too, in the way plans do. He'd intended to move back to Minnesota. Then he met the woman who is now his wife, and Chicago stopped being a waypoint. Remote had worked for eight years; it kept working.
What he brought back fit in no suitcase: testing discipline, automation instincts, telemetry habits — the Centro curriculum, applied to a decade of accumulated system with a confidence the first tour never had. "It was good to be better armed and less scared," he says, "rebuilding the systems one technical area at a time." And over the years that followed, the development team itself slowly took the shape of his Centro lesson: less a developer-ceremony org and more a product team — direction and technology concentrated where the thread could be held single, which increasingly meant in him. The title on his badge says Director of Software Development. The Centro discovery — IC at heart, allergic to owning other people's frictions — didn't lose to the title. It redesigned the department under it.
The ball
Ask him whether the detour was necessary and the answer comes fast and warm: "Yeah man, I had to go." Without it, "I would have always wondered — been scared of the same initial things." What the two and a half years actually manufactured wasn't a skill set, though the skills came home too. It was the end of the question that pushed him out the door. Does the experience translate? It translates. He'd watched it translate, get promoted, and get priced. "I needed that experience to go from imposter syndrome to always ends up with the ball," he says — and that phrase, better than any title he's held, is the job description he's been working under ever since.
The gap in the tape, it turns out, isn't missing years. It's where the confidence was manufactured. The record only ever hears the output. ❦