Some ideas rush into our heads with urgency and fanfare. Others take their time, showing up unannounced, pretending that they have always been there. One idea quietly snuck into my head on a Friday morning, eight months after I had abruptly lost my job. The job loss had shaken me. In all previous job changes I had been driving the change — not in this one. I had found and started a new job, but I had also spent a lot of those previous eight months re-evaluating my life, particularly the stories I tell myself and others about who I am and who I want to be.
This intrusive idea gently pointed out that I also needed to decide how I wanted to tell the story of my past. The idea was right: I no longer knew how I wanted to tell the story of my previous decade. If I couldn't tell the story of my past, how could I reasonably tell the story of my present and future?
In this post I explore that idea by diving into the disruption created by my job loss. I also review what I’m doing to tell my story with a narrative I both believe and feel good about. It is part of a series of posts reflecting on losing my job.
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My daughter reading a story to her second-grade class on her birthday, many years ago. |
My Story Through 2014
I can easily tell my life story through 2014. Here is the condensed version:
I grew up a smart, if awkward, kid in the suburbs with supportive parents who loved me. I did well in school and was confident that I would succeed in life. I went to college to study computer engineering. Over five great years I produced a strong academic record and a year’s worth of professional work experience. Towards the end of those five years, I met and started dating the woman I eventually married.
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| High school yearbook picture of me |
After graduating, I went to a top graduate school and pursued a Ph.D. I was still that same smart kid, but graduate school and research didn’t suit me as well as undergraduate classes had. I did well in my classes but struggled with the open-endedness and abstractness of the research. I also struggled with living in the midwest far away from my family. I fought through those struggles and (eventually) graduated with my Ph.D.
Major personal life events unfolded during my grad school years. In chronological order: I married my wife, my father unexpectedly died, I attended the Final Four and watched my alma mater win (go Cuse!), and my daughter was born.
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| With my wife at our wedding |
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| My father with a map on a hiking trip |
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| Me standing in the last row of the SuperDome watching the Final Four |
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| My daughter at one day old |
After finishing grad school, I got a job as a researcher at IBM in New York. I built a role for myself and did well. Among other things I worked on the architecture and performance evaluation of IBM POWER8 processor and co-created and ran a peer group for new hires. My wife and I continued to raise our family (now four of us after the birth of our son) and we put down roots in our new community. I joined a hiking group and hiked a lot. After nine productive years at IBM, I moved on to the next step in my professional journey.
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| My son at a few days old |
Disruption to My Professional Story
I joined a small but rapidly growing company. I spent ten years with this company before I was abruptly let go. I’m still figuring out how I want to tell the story of those ten years of my professional life.
A year before I lost my job, I would have told the following story: I joined a small but growing database company that was full of excitement, optimism, and smart people. I joined a team working to understand and improve the performance of the database. We had no idea what we were doing at the start, but over time, we figured it out, building tools and processes to help ourselves. As we kept improving that infrastructure, we pushed the state of the art forward for our industry, including publishing articles about it. I took increasing responsibility for that infrastructure, first stepping into a management role, and then building a new team to cover the areas of performance testing that were still missing.
I discovered I didn’t enjoy being a manager and I transitioned into a staff engineer role, with an even stronger sense of ownership and responsibility for the performance of our software. I worked to build the best role for myself and to do right by the company. Along the way, I also helped build communities within the company and develop my junior colleagues. I celebrated that I got to work at a special place.
This is a story full of challenges, growth, and positive memories.
In my final year I would tell that story, with the addition of a big jump forward in defining that role for myself, changing jobs and managers, with all the stress that comes with that.
In the days after losing my job, I no longer knew how to tell my story. It felt like a bad breakup. I had left jobs and roles before, but I had always been the one in control, driving the change — I was not in control of this change.
Rewriting My Story
Today I am trying to figure out what story I want to tell to myself and others about my time at that job. I'm trying to reconcile my many fond memories with the very non-fond memories of the end. As described above, the first nine years are easy for me to talk about, full of challenges, growth, success, and joy. The challenge is ending the story.
I can tell a story ending with anger at the forces that resisted my intentional efforts and ultimately led to my dismissal. I always try to acknowledge my emotions, because they are my emotions. But I don't want to dedicate much of my time to anger. Anger seldom helps me advance my life goals.
I can tell a story ending with self-recrimination and self-doubt about missed signals and opportunities. I do not like this story, but I'm willing to stay with it long enough to see what I can learn from it.
I can tell a story of a company changing as it rapidly grows during times of market changes (Covid pandemic, increasing interest rates, ...) — a company changing into something that I found less exciting and welcoming. As I discussed in Special Places, change is inevitable and it’s not worth getting upset about it. Rather, we/I should acknowledge the change and celebrate that the great parts existed for a time.
Finally, I can tell a story of intentionally setting my path, taking chances, and living with whatever comes, even though that outcome wasn’t what I had wanted. That is the heart of the Scariness of Getting What You Want.
All these stories are true. I suspect the story I will eventually want to tell will include parts of all of them. It’s a messy story, including plans, intentions, emotions, and external forces. I’m working on developing that integrated story that acknowledges the bad parts so I can learn from them, while embracing and celebrating the good parts. I think it’s going to take me some time to get it right — writing this post helps.
Thank you to Heather Beasley Doyle for her feedback on this post and her support through this entire period of my life. This post has particularly benefited from Heather's help, with multiple rounds of feedback and edits. Heather is a gifted writer. You should check out her homepage and her writing.