My tech career surpassed 30 years in June and I retired at the beginning of September. It took me a month to write something. It took that long to even begin to find the inspiration and the words. I was pretty wound up. Honestly, I am still decompressing, getting my footing in this new phase. Though work concerns were immediately eliminated, life still has its challenges. As I learned many times, things are not simply greener on the other side. There are always trade-offs, new challenges, and endless things to worry about.
I always wanted to leave on my own terms, ideally while I’m still contributing at or near my peak. So, this was a fine time to say goodbye and move on to the many other things my life has to offer.
There were many heartfelt goodbyes and well wishes. A month into retirement, I miss my colleagues and the intellectual challenges we tackled together. I was thrilled to still be learning new technology, process, and people skills right up to the very end. I finished on what I felt was a high, with an inspirational leader and talented team members headed in the right direction, fueled by their shared quest for excellence.
It was full-circle in many ways–my final role mirrored many of my early experiences to connect backend tech teams with real customers and their needs. In the early 2000s, my team members in Asia and I devoured academic and industry best practices while inventing and piloting our own techniques. They weren’t all successful. My “speed dating” event increased alignment between two intentionally distinct roles: technical subject-matter experts (SMEs) and single point of contact total customer experience (TCEs) owners. It was a clear mandate and a heck of a lot of fun. It just goes to show how timeless is the need to understand your customers and deliver validated solutions.
I’ve been extremely fortunate–a tech career at the right time in the world was an intersection of what I loved to do, what I was pretty good at, and what the industry/my company needed from me. The effort felt fairly rewarded and I had a relatively drama-free path.
In the early years, I was exhilarated by technical solutions (still am). When a colleague inadvertently created an out-of-control, recursively-forking process that consumed CPU and crashed servers, I wrote a process killer that spawned faster than the runaway. I worked across countries on global compute platforms before those were common. We worked around latency, solved race conditions and data consistency problems, and created scalable compute solutions before virtualization was a product.
Over the decades, my career took me around the world to amazing places, but more importantly it introduced me to the people. I experienced their kindness and shared the aspirations with people from cultures unfamiliar to a boy from Illinois. They helped me appreciate the difference between a country and a person—and we’re all just persons, honestly.
One of my fondest memories and most useful techniques for working across cultures was to say “ouch.” Team members across the US and no less than 7 countries in Asia were thrust together to extend tribal knowledge and consistently grow department personnel and solutions. We already shared a commitment to working cooperatively, however, political tensions, religion, and life views were just as diverse 26 years ago as they are today. There was plenty of opportunity for miscommunication, missteps, and honest mistakes while we were spending long days over months and eventually years together in person at multiple offices, on airplanes, phone calls, and team building events. We agreed to speak up if ever a joke or topic went too far, cut too deep, or just didn’t land right. Remarkably, I honestly don’t remember hearing anyone ever say ouch. Maybe the discussion and agreement around it was enough to establish the trust we needed to work together for 6+ years through boom and bust cycles. I’ll never forget those formative experiences, skills, and bonds we developed together. Thank you to everyone around the world that made me feel welcome in their country. I still treasure the friendships deeply and immediately feel welcome stepping off a plane in Malaysia, China, India, Philippines, and beyond. Those experiences and relationships really help the world feel smaller and less scary.
Most importantly, my travels introduced me to my amazing wife, my forever best friend—a story for another time (and props to my then-manager who supported me above and beyond the call of duty, changing my life forever). That led to my family, my greatest treasure and the ultimate motive for working hard. There was always tension between time on the job and time spent with family, but I can’t forget it was my career that enabled me to build my family. It’s been a privilege that I will never take for granted.
This was all during a time when the world wasn’t any more harmonious than it is today. Sure, we hadn’t had a COVID lockdown or existential AI threat yet, but we had the tail end of the Cold War, the Challenger space shuttle explosion, the year 2000, and the dot com bust. Calamity seemed to be imminent. We couldn’t export PGP or high-end CPUs from the USA. One late evening from a hotel room in Singapore the night before I was on a flight back home, I was on the phone dismissing my mother’s safety concerns as I watched airplanes fly into the World Trade Center towers. It would be another week before I got home, giving me awkward solo time to reflect on just what the world really was and how I existed in it. That changed how I navigated through it.
Years later at a divestiture/joint venture I battled across an Italian-American cultural divide and learned to put Disagree and Commit into practice. A now close friend demonstrated leadership back then when he managed-up to me and my manager. He took a stand: we needed to role-model working through our differences, for the good of the team and company. We took accountability for our contribution to the office politics then made mental changes and took concrete steps to address the issues. I was shocked by my own culpability, thinking I had already learned this lesson after 12 years experience.
I worked many, many late nights and weekends. Sometimes those were bonding moments well worth the short-term push towards a deadline (we sometimes got t-shirts to go with the pizza). Other times, it was just grueling, resentment-building hell. A few times I found inspiration from inscriptions on old buildings, from people facing more challenging circumstances. When I got the chance to lead others, I channeled all my experience and judgement into my teams and how we worked. Fortunately people were generally forgiving when the calls I made weren’t always just right.
As a leader and people manager I’ve had to take a position and deliver difficult messages. Those never got easier. I just hope I did the right things more often than not. It’s sometimes difficult to tell in the moment and there are always trade-offs. Language and human communication is deceptively imprecise. I hope I came up with the right words to express myself. I appreciate the opportunity to engage in genuine dialog when it mattered most.
I learned so much on this 3 decade journey. It was a good use of time. I’ll always remember the challenges, the solutions, and the camaraderie. While my career doesn’t totally define me, it sure made a big, multi-faceted impression. I hope I created value for the shareholders. 🙂
Thank you, my colleagues—you were inspiration itself.
Thank you to my parents who have always been in my corner. Thank you to my wife for her constant effort and adaptability. Thank you to my children for their sacrifice they had no chance to choose. Thank you to my classmates who surrounded me with curiosity and ideas, including my old buddies in The C++ Gang who still hold a special place in my heart. I had some amazing managers and leaders along the way that role-modeled excellence and supported me–thank you. Thank you to all that challenged me, put up with me, and helped me grow.
Onward and upward as they say. Let’s see what life has to offer next. My daily step count is already way up!
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