Reflections On Leaving My Job

This past Friday was my last day at my most recent job. I started seriously thinking about leaving back in October and I didn’t make the commitment to go separate ways until the end of January. I have no job I’m hopping over to. Part of my desire to, ahem, “be unemployed” (exploring new opportunities) is to give myself an adult summer vacation, breathe in the space and see what comes.

Amusingly, not long after I gave notice I became more productive in my role. I was more communicative with my team about what I did not understand and my timelines for being able to get something done. I started doing more sweet things for my teammates like saving peanut butter cups for our project manager who is pregnant and was looking for one two days prior, or making an origami x-wing for a teammate who has a bunch of Star Wars lego sets on his desk. Overall I was writing better code, doing more reviews, and participating in more discussions because I was happier. And I was happier because I knew this was all going to end.

That sense of it ending has been a surprisingly weird one for me. I know the Bay Area isn’t very big, and I’d be walking through the office and thinking, “This is likely the last time I will see Julian/Jake/Ali.” I felt like I was a ghost haunting the halls of something I was already divorced from. It’s as if to be laid off is to be metaphorically killed, and to leave voluntarily is to die. There wasn’t the, look-away-as-you’re-walked-out/executed, but the “We’re sorry to see you leave”, the reluctant, “don’t go.”

I’m not here to hate on the people, the company, or my role. I’m writing this as a reminder for myself on what I can do to help myself feel a part of a group in a way that leverages my strengths while paying attention to the excuses I’ve used to not do these at my last job.

A thing I wish I had done was take every new member of my team out to lunch within the first three days of their joining. Just us, one-on-one, and I’d pay for both meals with my own money. While we could use that time to talk about roles and our team, I’d rather use that time to learn about them as a person; where they are from, what they do when they aren’t working, what do they find hilarious, and what we could learn from each other that’s outside of the bounds of our deskjob.

On my last day, after my exit interview, I got lunch with the other longest standing member of our team. We’d both been around for more than two-and-a-half-years, I always liked him, and we never got lunch together. It was delightful. It was everything I listed above about learning about each other. Instead of doing this first when we could have leveraged it the most, I did it last where we have to go out of our way to maintain connection if that’s something we want to do.

Another thing I wish I had done was complement my coworkers on things I appreciated about them that weren’t job specific. Admittedly, this would be easier to do with more context form something like the lunch I mentioned above.

In my last group goodbye I mentioned a specific engineer there and told him that I think he’s hilarious. I also told him that I thought he was a little strange when he first joined and that I quickly grew to enjoy his sense of humor and perspective. He emailed me the next day to tell me that he appreciated it and to assure me that he can be serious as well. I had plenty of opportunities to tell him this and more things I enjoyed about him and I never did until then. I thought about it and I reasoned that I knew I wanted to leave “soon” so why put in the effort. The why is because it could have made every day leading up to my departure full of more laughter for myself and hopefully him too.

A thing I wish I had done sooner was request that the team go out and do things together with a regular cadence. Get some of that group bounding going in a context that wasn’t the office. While everyone on our team was chill, there is a certain kind of closeness that can only be formed from sharing new experiences or context with each other. Without it we were mainly hunched over our desks, separate from one another, and not collaborating as deeply as we could.

In one of our monthly retrospectives (well into my flirting with the idea of leaving) I proposed that we go out as a team more (ever, really). This immediately changed the tone of the meeting. Everyone was engaged in thinking of what we could do, where we could go, and questioning how often we could do something like this. Two weeks later an event was scheduled and almost everyone went. All it took was someone making a request in a place where everyone could hear it.

Lastly, and most obviously, I could have spoken up about my dissatisfaction sooner. I did and I never captured the intensity of it correctly. Little corrections were made by the team along the way and they weren’t enough to resolve my frustration. As my frustration grew I both moved closer to quitting and I was more honest about my thoughts with my boss. That resulted in things starting to change and it was already too late.

In short, going into any group in the future I’ll be asking myself: - How can I build relationships with my team regardless of any pre-existing cultures of not doing so? - What do I admire about my teammates and how can I let them know in a way that they feel it? - How can I influence positive cultural change in my team REGARDLESS of my position within that team? - What are my pain points in our processes, how can I change them, and how can I get support from the team to alleviate them?

Reflecting on this has already impacted the way I’m interacting with my social groups. I’m extending invitations to hang out with a broader set of people who I’ve enjoyed being around but never had one-on-one time with. I’m telling people things I appreciate about them or something they did instead of staying in silent appreciation. I’m looking into facilitating different types of events to bring different groups of friends together. My house just went through the Grievances Process I proposed for the first time and it was a wonderful success with ample opportunities for refinement.

Coming out of this job I want to own my actions and my inaction. Resolving myself to be a victim of circumstances doesn’t do me any good. I know I have patterns and disempowering stories that can lead me to places I don’t want to go if I leave them unexamined. By reflecting through journaling, exercising stronger boundaries, leveraging clearer communication, and having sorted priorities I can more effectively advocate for myself and bolster my communities. Every time I have done any of these things my life has improved. It’s time to broaden the spectrum of my life that I apply this to.