As many of you who follow me on social know, I gave my notice a few weeks ago, bringing to an end my more than fifteen years in consulting (for now). It wasn’t an easy decision for me, for numerous reasons, but one of the reasons that at the beginning seemed to make the decision harder, ultimately led me to make the choice I did.
Getting Comfortable
I had become very comfortable in my previous role, a role I had held at the same organization for almost 8 years over the last 10 (with a little adjustment in scope here and there). At first I felt this was a reason to stay, work was easy, I knew what I was doing, I had the connections and network to get things done, I pleased my customers and got great performance reviews. For many of us, thats a great place to be, and even I had become fairly accustomed to it, I had become comfortable. But that’s not me, it’s not who I want to be, it never has been.
What I needed was challenge, difficulty, resistance. Just like at the gym, “no pain, no gain”, and while I tended to maintain my technical edge through challenging myself and mentoring others, my career had slowed down to that dangerous comfort zone, and what I thought was a blessing, was actually a curse.
Opportunity Knocks
Fortunately for me, a former colleague and friend had moved over to a new position at a larger organization, a really large one, and was constantly reminding me how much fun I’d have working on global Azure architecture and DevOps challenges that seem to pile up daily at a firm of that size. I wasn’t too interested to start with, the idea of being at a huge firm had never held much excitement for me, but as I dug a little deeper and started to talk to other friends and colleagues in similar roles, I started to see patterns emerge on what I was hearing, I heard about opportunity, and challenge, and scale, things I just wasn’t seeing a ton of anymore, and I liked what I heard!
Working for a large organization on large organization problems isn’t something I’ve had the fortune of doing outside of some of my short term projects for various large customers, email migrations for 30’000 here, $20MM of Azure workloads there, but not ongoing work to meet the ever increasing needs of a really large org.
Moving On
So as of this week, I am a Senior Manager, Data/Information Architecture at Deloitte, the worlds largest professional services firm, and although I’m only one of almost 300’000 team members across the global organization, between the messaging during on-boarding and all the conversations I had getting to this point, I’m back to feeling like what I do matters, and that my personal growth and my organizations growth are not mutually exclusive goals. I’m looking forward to the challenges ahead, and the opportunities that await.
