Why did I leave?
I left because it was time. In my previous article I discussed good and bad reasons for leaving a job. I wanted to share my personal experience as to why I left my last job. My hope is this will give a practical review of my previous article.
First I want to acknowledge my former employer. They are a huge corporation which makes chocolate. Working there provided me with lots of opportunity to grow and continue to transform my career. Further I worked in an IS department full of awesome and dedicated people. People who invested in me and provided opportunity. I really enjoyed and valued the time I spent working there. As a result I left Hershey a better person. If you were expecting dirt, you aren’t going to find any. This article is a personal reflection and it isn’t intended to do harm to the company or others.
A man wishing to be unhappy finds many ways to prove his course.
~Master Sifu
If you stay with one organization long enough you will find many reasons to leave. I really struggled with the idea of leaving. I felt I could be happy for many years to come. I knew things changed enough over time that I could continue to grow. Ultimately I left because it was time. I fulfilled my vision. I gave all I could give. There was nothing left for me to do. And I believe I left the place better than I found it. But there were several thoughts and reflections that led up to my final decision to leave that are worth sharing.
When I first got the itch to leave, it opened me up to a new set of thinking. Over the course of about a year, I allowed myself to process all the thoughts that flowed as a result. I questioned those thoughts and made sure it led to good reasoning.
Hershey was my first corporate job. While I worked as a consultant and saw the inside of a fair number of large companies, I was mostly isolated (by design) to technical work which shielded me from all the mechanics, organizational structure and politics of a corporate environment.
Honestly, I expected more from a fortune 500 company. I don’t mean they could have done better. I was naive. I thought finally I will work for a mature company that is well organized. This may come across as a disparaging comment, but I have come to learn a lot about the fact that corporate IT environments lack good process. It is partly the field but partly the origin stories for most corporate IT environments.
I expected more engineering. I conflated silicon valley tech companies with working in IT. (Subject for another article). So if I were to leave, I wasn’t going to trade one corporate environment for another. It would have to be something different.
I rank Hershey IT very high especially in the CPG space. It is a much needed field and provides more value to a company than most would give credit. But for me I had had enough of corporate IT. I was tired of it.
A corollary to understanding this is the realization that IT is a support role. It isn’t directly part of the product. As I started putting together a list of what I wanted from my next company, it was clear I needed to work for a engineering-led company. And I had to be closer to the product.
Another thought that kept me from experiencing joy at my job was feeling undervalued and unappreciated. This is a very challenging statement. I really spent a lot of time considering why I felt this way, and if it were true.
Let’s face it, if you feel undervalued or unappreciated, real or imaginary, that is a problem. One of the contributing factors leading to this feeling is the performance review. Most work cultures have some form of a performance review. It is extremely hard for people and organizations to provide an objective review. So using this as a guide for appreciation is dangerous. The outcomes right or wrong are not a good reflection of appreciation.
If you are lucky, you get some sort of feedback once a month about how well you are doing and how much you are appreciated. At worst you might get it once a year or not at all.
To be honest corporations are bad at it. They are over and under inclusive with awards and rewards. You can’t take all of this personally. My advice is ignore all the group and public accolades. Instead, listen for what individuals tell you. Their comments carry a lot more weight.
You could also take the view that you are getting paid so why are you complaining. I came to the conclusion I was appreciated after tracking the times people did show appreciation and leaving for this reason would be an awful one.
An insight that occurred to me during my evaluation about my career was how the environment, unchecked, will shape it. I joined as a senior infrastructure specialist. The infrastructure specialist role is corporate speak for “I work on servers”. When you add the word senior it means I have been around long enough to fix more problems than I created.
I had the fortunate opportunity to be promoted to cloud architect. This position gave me a lot of freedom to set the technical direction for the company, and allowed me to work on projects on my own terms. It resulted in a lot of great skill building which ironically led to me leaving the company.
The difficulty I faced was that Hershey’s culture is essentially focused on managers and teams, and leaves very little room for independent contributors rising to higher levels of the organization. As a result there are only a couple roles I could be promoted to. Unexamined you think those are the roles you want.
I am not one for titles or promotion as a sign of value or identity, but it is a measure. I worked hard and solved a lot of very tough technical problems during my time. It was difficult to witness a management track that could reward people accordingly and a technical track that doesn’t match the same progression.
All that negativity aside, I decided I didn’t want any company holistically to shape my career. I allowed myself to be lured into the path of “what is next” by what the company had to offer, not what can I offer the world and what can the world offer me. I was easily enticed by the company’s career path because the first promotion was rewarding.
It is a poor reason to consider leaving just because you feel a technical promotion won’t happen. But it is a good reason if you have grown, and the relationship is no longer mutually beneficial. One of the things I wanted was corporate experience, but I need to work with people who understand my technical capability and how it can be applied regardless of my title.
On the other hand, allowing an environment to shape me can also be a force of good. I felt my skills were getting stale. Even though I was adopting new skills, learning cloud providers like Azure and AWS, working with infrastructure as code tools like terraform, and automating builds with CI/CD pipelines, those skills were underutilized and not well understood by others in the department. I needed others around me who wanted to solve the problems with code to continue to challenge me.
Another idea that kept resonating in my mind is how many more companies will I have the chance to work for? If I stay with the trend of about seven years per company, how many more will there be? Two maybe three?
A couple years into my time with Hershey I had a very strong urge to leave. I had just discovered terraform and really wanted to be part of the early days at Hashicorp. Then I got promoted and there was a lot of promising work unfolding like migrating our data centers to the cloud. I don’t regret sticking around. I experienced a lot of growth during that period. But part of me thinks what if.
I had realized my vision for myself at this company by promoting positive culture change, growing my skills, and always helping others learn and grow. I gained new skills in high demand. Coupled with the knowledge I only have a few more companies to work for in my career, I thought I would swing big and go for a dream job.
You only live once.
