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6-27-13, 4:11pm
My spouse is heading home from work, the last day working for this employer - trading a three hour a day commute, on average each day, for a commute to a new job that will never exceed an hour round-trip, and a commute that we'll share, since the new job is across the street from where I work. This is the "good way" to leave a job, on your own terms, with (to put it crudely) the employer more concerned about your departure than you are.
I've had the pleasure a couple of times. I left my first job, a prestigious R&D job, to start a new practice at a Big Six firm. I left that practice on my own terms, as well, after a million miles in the air in five years. I remember both of those experiences as perhaps the most pastoral of my working life - the knowledge that I was leaving behind very good work, for very good reasons and for the good of my family.
Since then, I haven't been as lucky. That next job vanished after just nine months when the entire division was let go at once. It wasn't even a seniority thing - my boss the director and her boss the VP went out for barbecue and beer, on company time (and for all I know, perhaps the company dime), that last day. And for the first time in my life I was out of work with no future prospects. It took many months to land new work, and it was a risk - a completely new career doing something that I wasn't really credentialed for, but something that I thought I would really enjoy doing.
I should think more often about how appreciative I am to the man who took a chance on me. It was a very small company - his own company - with just six of us, including me. It launched my second career, a career which someone told me today was what I was clearly born to do. Five years later, my spouse was working there too, when a nasty recession hit. Prudence dictated that we not both work for the same small company. I jumped.
It wasn't the same. It was a bit of a desperation move. The employer I was leaving understood completely - there was no bad blood - but it still was a disappointment for me. I took solace in the fact that this new job was actually an opportunity to do my new career with regard to the subject-matter of my first career - kismet. It has surely worked out. I'm in just about the most secure position someone doing my kind of work can do, and it's fun work when they let me do it.
However, I have been considering how I'd leave this job. I'm almost completely convinced that leaving this job means leaving this career. I'm certifiably old, doing this kind of work. It's a younger person's game. I'm still here because poor decisions by management has led to a situation where they are stuck needing to do something that only one person in the world is actually qualified to do (me). I'm not really worried about how my leaving will affect the company - they did this to themselves and I wouldn't leave precipitously - but I'm still not sure I see leaving this job a good way as I described it above, i.e., feeling safe and secure about the future. Because this time it'll be stepping out into the great unknown that revolves around the question, "Have I saved enough?"
Anyway, I'm getting ahead of things. My spouse is enjoying a job departure "the good way", the first since 1993. That year, one of the largest companies in the world recruited my spouse, actively, and my job was such that it didn't matter where we lived, so we moved. However, I think leaving a job "the good way" is different when you're mature than when you're younger - I think you're better able to appreciate it. Twenty years of additional maturity matters.
After a good run, my spouse was burning out and joined me at that small company I mentioned. We worked together on projects, so actually spent time with each other 24/7 for years. It was fine. None of the prototypical hi-jinks that people warn you about, regarding working with your spouse, occurred. It was good that I left, though, because a few months later that small company was so badly decimated by the recession that all the staff was let go. Finding a job in a recession is no fun, I assure you.
You take whatever you can get. My spouse go lucky, though. After eight month my spouse had a new job and had a good run with it, before being forced out with the rest of those over 40. Another extended period looking for a new jobs was followed with taking the stinker of a job my spouse is leaving now (the one with the utterly incomprehensibly terrible commute).
So I'm hoping that this new job is another winner for my spouse. Like me, my spouse is pretty sure that this will be it, the last job of a career in this industry, so hopefully it is another good run - five years would be nice, six years would be really good, seven years would be fantastic. It'll put my spouse past FRA, and that seventh year (assuming I'm still working straight through to then) will represent that icing on the cake, pushing our portfolio over the boundary between "we may" and "we will" (be able to afford to retire).
I've had the pleasure a couple of times. I left my first job, a prestigious R&D job, to start a new practice at a Big Six firm. I left that practice on my own terms, as well, after a million miles in the air in five years. I remember both of those experiences as perhaps the most pastoral of my working life - the knowledge that I was leaving behind very good work, for very good reasons and for the good of my family.
Since then, I haven't been as lucky. That next job vanished after just nine months when the entire division was let go at once. It wasn't even a seniority thing - my boss the director and her boss the VP went out for barbecue and beer, on company time (and for all I know, perhaps the company dime), that last day. And for the first time in my life I was out of work with no future prospects. It took many months to land new work, and it was a risk - a completely new career doing something that I wasn't really credentialed for, but something that I thought I would really enjoy doing.
I should think more often about how appreciative I am to the man who took a chance on me. It was a very small company - his own company - with just six of us, including me. It launched my second career, a career which someone told me today was what I was clearly born to do. Five years later, my spouse was working there too, when a nasty recession hit. Prudence dictated that we not both work for the same small company. I jumped.
It wasn't the same. It was a bit of a desperation move. The employer I was leaving understood completely - there was no bad blood - but it still was a disappointment for me. I took solace in the fact that this new job was actually an opportunity to do my new career with regard to the subject-matter of my first career - kismet. It has surely worked out. I'm in just about the most secure position someone doing my kind of work can do, and it's fun work when they let me do it.
However, I have been considering how I'd leave this job. I'm almost completely convinced that leaving this job means leaving this career. I'm certifiably old, doing this kind of work. It's a younger person's game. I'm still here because poor decisions by management has led to a situation where they are stuck needing to do something that only one person in the world is actually qualified to do (me). I'm not really worried about how my leaving will affect the company - they did this to themselves and I wouldn't leave precipitously - but I'm still not sure I see leaving this job a good way as I described it above, i.e., feeling safe and secure about the future. Because this time it'll be stepping out into the great unknown that revolves around the question, "Have I saved enough?"
Anyway, I'm getting ahead of things. My spouse is enjoying a job departure "the good way", the first since 1993. That year, one of the largest companies in the world recruited my spouse, actively, and my job was such that it didn't matter where we lived, so we moved. However, I think leaving a job "the good way" is different when you're mature than when you're younger - I think you're better able to appreciate it. Twenty years of additional maturity matters.
After a good run, my spouse was burning out and joined me at that small company I mentioned. We worked together on projects, so actually spent time with each other 24/7 for years. It was fine. None of the prototypical hi-jinks that people warn you about, regarding working with your spouse, occurred. It was good that I left, though, because a few months later that small company was so badly decimated by the recession that all the staff was let go. Finding a job in a recession is no fun, I assure you.
You take whatever you can get. My spouse go lucky, though. After eight month my spouse had a new job and had a good run with it, before being forced out with the rest of those over 40. Another extended period looking for a new jobs was followed with taking the stinker of a job my spouse is leaving now (the one with the utterly incomprehensibly terrible commute).
So I'm hoping that this new job is another winner for my spouse. Like me, my spouse is pretty sure that this will be it, the last job of a career in this industry, so hopefully it is another good run - five years would be nice, six years would be really good, seven years would be fantastic. It'll put my spouse past FRA, and that seventh year (assuming I'm still working straight through to then) will represent that icing on the cake, pushing our portfolio over the boundary between "we may" and "we will" (be able to afford to retire).