This Isn't My First Time

What's there today can change tomorrow

If you've been at one company for fifteen or twenty years and it just ended, here's the first thing I want you to know: I've been where you are five times. Not one of them was about my work.

I'm going to list them, because the list is the point. But first, so you know how far back this goes.

1986: a floppy disk

I wrote my first program in high school, in BASIC and then Pascal. It was an algebra tutor. Back then you booted the machine from one floppy, swapped in a blank one, and formatted it. I forgot to swap. I formatted my own source disk and wiped the only copy of the first program I ever wrote.

In the Navy I went to school on an automated carrier landing system. It loaded from Mylar punch tape through an optical reader, and the front panel was a field of lights you toggled in octal to talk to it. What it did with that was take over an aircraft's autopilot and put it on the deck of a carrier. After I got out, I spent two stints as a civilian contractor working on the same system.

So I'd been around computers my whole working life. That didn't protect me from any of what follows.

1998: a trade agreement

I got out of the Navy in 1993 as an electronics technician. The first few jobs were stable, and when I moved, it was my choice.

Then NAFTA passed, and the plant I worked at packed up and moved to Mexico. I had nothing to do with that decision. I just worked there.

What saved me was that the same trade deal that closed the plant came with retraining money, capped at two years of school. I still had some GI Bill left, and I was in the Army National Guard. So I went back to college and did a two-year computer science degree in eighteen months, because the money wasn't going to last any longer than that.

2002: a stock price

That degree got me my first real programming job, writing software for fiber-optic measurement systems in an R&D lab. I loved it. It was exactly what my Navy background had set me up for.

Then an analyst decided there was enough fiber in the ground for the next ten years. The stock went from around $120 a share to $1.20. The lab went from 84 people to 14 across three rounds of layoffs. In one of those rounds I was told I was one of the people they'd turn the lights off before they let go.

I got let go anyway. It came down to me or my supervisor, who had eighteen years in. If he'd had twenty, he could have taken a voluntary package and I'd have stayed. He didn't.

2003: a checkbox

Now I had three years of programming experience and an associate degree, and every posting required a bachelor's. I could not get an interview. Not one.

So I gave up on programming and took a contract doing desktop support. I kept writing code anyway. A tool that pinged us when new cases came in. A patch for a virus that was going around, thrown together in a day, that ended up pushed to every one of the company's plants worldwide.

And I went back to school online at night. Finished the bachelor's. Then, since I was already there, the master's. That's what got me back into a programming job.

2007: an outsourcing decision

The next stop was a small consulting firm. I'd moved from desktop applications to web development because they were short on web developers and somebody had to. Then the client outsourced all its web work overseas, and the firm went under.

That one I saw coming. After three rounds of layoffs at the last place, I'd learned to read the room. I'd already interviewed and had an offer in hand, an hour and a half away, before the doors closed. Not a job I loved. A job that paid.

2014: a hiring freeze

That led, eventually, to a manufacturing plant rewrite where the 2008 downturn took the rest of my team and left me working alone for years. More on that next post. When I finally burned out, I had a way out: a dream job in the company's R&D group, building test systems with physicists and chemists. Offer in hand.

My department put a one-month hold on the transfer. One month became three. Then the new department froze hiring. Nobody was laid off. They just couldn't take me.

Six months later I showed up to work and was told my contract had been terminated. No warning. Out the door that morning.

2025: an email

You know the start of this one from the first post. After eight years at a remote job that stopped keeping up with the cost of living, and a two-year search, I landed a senior engineering role. Glowing reviews. Then a manager changed, and one morning there was an email from HR asking for a meeting.

That search took two and a half months. I'm now somewhere I think of as my forever job. But I've thought that before.

What five times taught me

None of it was about my work. A trade deal, a stock price, a degree requirement, an outsourcing decision, a hiring freeze, a personality. If you've just been let go after many years of dedicated service, that's worth sitting with for a minute. The ground moved. You didn't fall.

The other thing: every time, the way out was something I could actually do. Go to school. Take the lesser job and keep coding. Start interviewing before the door closes. Write it all down so the next search is shorter.

That last one is what the rest of this blog is about. But first, the part that made the two-year search so long: thirteen years of working alone.