Resignation, with Thanks
Congratulations on quitting. Almost. This is a resignation letter to myself as I gather my thoughts before tomorrow morning.
No, it didn't end the way you hoped it would (or could). A year ago, you sat in a New York wine bar talking with your soon-to-be mother-in-law about the exciting, hopeful year ahead. It was to be a year full of promise and high hopes. There was certainly going to be plenty to celebrate personally, and it finally felt like we were heading in the right direction at work. Perhaps an exit was on the horizon? Wouldn't that be nice. Looking back, I don't think I was naïve to think that could be possible, things were trending up and pieces were falling into place. Alas, this resignation letter is not about what could have been or what fell apart. No, this is a thank you note. This is an expression of gratitude for the past few years and what my time at work has unlocked and unleashed.
I write a lot of notes, it's a way for me to think. And while I like to think I have recently formalized my journaling into a practice, a holiday trip home often results in downtime where I peruse some old moleskine notebook or planner that ended up gathering dust in my childhood bedroom. I found the right stack of papers, this time, and looked at them at the right time, this weekend. These pages were a draft of a cover letter I was writing for a role I really wanted sometime back in 2021. It was a 6 month program at a very promising data tooling startup that I saw as the formalization and accelerant I needed. At that time, I had spent about 2 years teaching myself to program with whatever free time I could scape together as a desperate bid to course correct for making the wrong choice upon graduation. I took courses, I did projects, I found datasets and built dashboards and ran analyses and actually found a client or two to pay me. But, there was still so much I didn't know and couldn't know without some help.
I have been reflecting on my time in this role quite a lot recently. Initially, it was easy to be negative and critical (that's what a lot of my earlier posts were about. I started this blog, in the first place, to work through some feelings about a fucked up situation at work) but I didn't like feeling vindictive and I didn't want to leave with any bad blood. Because, the truth is that I am incredibly grateful. So, finding this draft cover letter from over four years ago where I am so clear about what I wanted and what I felt I needed served as an important reminder that I got it. I achieved what I set out to do, and that is why this chapter is coming to a close.
I put a star next to this blurb:
It is my goal and hope to join this program because I realize I need help. I've been able to do and learn a lot on my own, but to really launch into this next stage and pivot, I need something rigorous and fast-paced, to be held to high standards. I recognize that I need help in actualizing this career transformation. I can only do so much on my own and the learning opportunity presented by this program would be invaluable.
While I got through a few rounds of interviews, I did not get one of the four spots in the program and thank God for that. The opportunity alone is what I needed to articulate what I needed. It was that clarity that allowed me to go out and define the chapter I am now closing. When I joined this 40 person Series A tech startup I was coming from a peon role in a massive multinational. The job was process, the company was molasses, and the people bored the hell out of me. I was not just patching technical gaps, I had to learn how an entirely different type of organization operated. The teams were small enough that I could actually see what sales and marketing and finance and the C suite and the variants of the engineering org were doing. We used to have decent internal communication and I was amazed at how things just seemed to work together with a mystical cohesion.
It was a lot but I was prepared to learn it all. I took off running because that's what they said they needed. I learned on the fly and felt behind most of the time. It felt like I had to relearn how to communicate, not just because we used Slack instead of email but because there was this thing called a standup and monthly retros and we had a project manager, or was it a product manager, or maybe we had both? I didn't know, because before I joined this industry I never needed to know. PM was a title, it took me longer that I'd care to admit to realize that product and project managers were vastly different roles (and product actually sounds fairly interesting). I barely knew git, I couldn't tell you the difference between a data lake and a data warehouse, I could write some decent sql but couldn't tell you about optimizations. Any Python I could write was a hacky one-off script, at best, and what the hell was a test?
When the team started to evolve and some hierarchy was instilled, I was not in the least bit interested in a management role. For one, I don't have much interest in middle management in general, but I couldn't fathom taking that step forward when I felt like I was still drowning. I don't regret that decision in the slightest, because that wasn't the growth this chapter was meant to deliver.
I think the past few years have almost been like working at an experimental lab more than a serious company. We built cool shit all the time. We pivoted and built new cool shit. I was able to work with clients when I asked to, I was able to travel to conferences when I wanted to, I was granted the latitude to pause regular work and go off into a cave because I had a fun idea and wanted to see what I could hack together.
I learned organizational management practices, good and bad, along the way and saw how the company morphed. Sometimes evolving, sometimes devolving. I met an incredible range of coworkers and peers with fascinating backgrounds and I am grateful for the company offsites that brought us together for some unserious time to just get to know each other. It's many of those former coworkers that helped me through these past few weeks of feeling distraught and lost as I went through another process of searching for the ability to articulate what I need next.
And I have that. Because of these past few years, because of the people I have met along the way, because of what I have learned I am ready for what comes next. First thing tomorrow morning I will quit the job that changed my life and two weeks after that I start writing the next chapter.
So, thank you. Thank you for taking a chance on me and being the help I needed. Thank you to the people I have met along the way. Thank you for the salary bump I needed when we went to a single income family for four years. Thank you for the trips, and the memories, and the t shirts and swag. Thank you for the experience, thank you for the trust, thank you for being the train that came back (maybe I'll explain that one one day).