(Me at Work: 2009)
This week marked the end of a 25 year career run across six companies. The last one, Qualcomm, decided to let quite a few very experienced people go… yours truly included, plus one recently-hired young (sacrificial) QA person to avoid the stink of ageism. While the words I used in that last sentence may hint toward bitterness, nothing could be further from the truth. I am being cynical, not bitter.
To be frank, the “pesky day job” required more time that I was increasingly loathe to devote to it. The bugs were getting less challenging and more annoying. The product requirements were becoming more administrative than creative. The people… well the people only made it more difficult to make my own decision to go my own way. Quality through and through and the most difficult part of walking away from such a tenure. To work with such people on a daily basis was an unforgettable blessing.
Everyone at work knew something was up. At one point, I was in the loop, but was then removed from the management meetings “to focus on your engineering work”. Heh. I was too much of an optimist to realize that that was step one for me. That was approximately two months ago. Over that time, the uncertainty was eating at me. My parents, once I told them that I had been laid off, were actually relieved. “We thought you were hiding or dealing with a health issue.” Other folks noticed that I was no longer talking about work in positive tones. My mood was increasingly dour.
Throughout those two months, a thought kept permeating my psyche, “What do you want to do?” In my quiet moments, the thought became so insistent that I started catching myself saying it out loud as a mantra. “What do you want to do?”
Am I retiring? That question has come up a lot in conversations over the past week. I am at an age where becoming someone else’s employee gets more difficult. A potential employer would have to come up with very strong reasons to shell out good lucre for a person of my skills and experience, but who would only be working there for a short time due to my age. As for me, I’ve been complaining about how the “pesky day job” gets in the way of what I want to do. “What do you want to do?”
If retirement means being able to draw on funds saved over the course of a career, then I can’t. That’s just math, time and policy. If retirement means that I get a fresh start to build a second sort of career and build something new while supplementing my future retirement income… “What do you want to do?”
I want to jump into the next chapter. Call it whatever you want.
I’ve talked with quite a few folks about building my “retirement job”, my wife first and foremost among them. Now, instead of merely talking about it, I get to do it. I now have a chance to focus on the creation of such a job without having to divert my time to the management of the exit strategy of the first career. For that, I am grateful to the manner of my eviction. Did it wound my pride a bit to be told that I was no longer indispensable? Yes… but that’s such a small price to pay considering the opportunity I have before me.
For the first time in a while, I am relieved and excited to begin something new. I can now focus on Brick Mill Games and Steel & Steam and NES projects and Mill 6 projects etc. and bring them to fruition. As you can see, I’m already too busy on the first day of my unemployment.
How lucky am I?