Photo by Keagan Henman on Unsplash
I intended to just do a little website tinkering behind the scenes this morning, and had some crafting-related posts to start writing up, but I felt I should post something about my recent departure at the last place I worked at for the last 8+ years. I’ve said all the nice public thingies one would post on LinkedIn early September 2021 and it’s not rocket science to find that out and all those words said were genuine and authentic.
But what I’m posting here is to expand in one spot all the things I have been telling my ex-colleagues about why I left so it’s sort of stream of consciousness here, but at least it’s out there and out of my head.
There was no one single factor that drove me to resign, but several. The pandemic was part of it. The working from home and longer days was also part of it. Not feeling as connected with folks outside my team whilst the company was expanding at a rapid pace and all of the growing/scaling pains that come with that.
But underlying it all was a sense that inside, deep down, was never being out of “work” mode for 15+ years, the time I was there and the previous place I was at. Very little downtime and yet at the same time growth and change was happening externally, and internally within myself, but that pace of growth between those 2 sides was not in sync and diverged to the point where finally, it didn’t make sense for me to be there anymore.
I’ve learned and grown a lot, and learned to deal with uncertainty and unknowns. Picked up a lot of great technical and people management skills along the way. But by the same token, I’ve also learned what I am not good at, what I do not want to do anymore. But, silver linings-wise, I found new things I hadn’t realized I might want to do as my next…and those are worth looking into.
Lastly. What am I doing for the next little while? I’m looking at this as a smash-up between a gap year and a working holiday for the next few months. Turns out being in a pandemic has helped me save up quite a bit by not going out so feeling very fortunate I can take this time off. I have a lot of new skills I’d like to acquire and some career assessment things to look into. Technology in the last 10 years has exploded and there’s a world of possibilities of new things to be doing, and that is where I’d like to be.
