I saw it coming before anyone else did. By mid-November I could read the writing on the wall for the business — the one my old Paranet crowd and I had built together — clearly enough that I walked away before it actually folded. It closed for good not long after I left. I'd like to tell you I handled the exit itself wisely. I didn't. I kept spending like the paychecks were still coming, and by the end of December I'd burned through almost everything I had. Nobody did that to me. I did that to...
25 days ago • 2 min read
Being happy at Sprint Paranet didn't mean things stayed easy — if anything, it meant the demands ramped up harder. I moved from systems administrator to Unix engineer right as the whole industry was racing toward Y2K, which meant I was on the road constantly, updating systems against a deadline nobody could push back. I wore the exhaustion like a badge of honor at the time. Burnout doesn't always look like burnout while you're living it — sometimes it just looks like being needed. Somewhere...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
The first job I took in Kansas City looked like a clear win on paper. Same kind of role I'd had back in San Diego, but better pay, and the cost of living had dropped enough that the raise felt like a bigger raise than it actually was. Win-win, right there in the numbers. I remember doing the math more than once just to make sure I wasn't imagining it. What the numbers didn't show me was the org chart underneath the org chart. That job turned into a daily political battle — not one big blowup,...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Two years after that mailroom, I'd already been promoted three times. Three promotions in two years sounds like a success story, and depending on who's telling it, I guess it is. But three promotions came with three new sets of responsibilities and roughly one raise's worth of actual pay increase. I was doing more, carrying more, getting trusted with bigger problems — and going home every night doing math that didn't add up. Titles kept climbing. The paycheck wasn't keeping pace, and neither...
2 months ago • 1 min read
Stepping out of the Navy, my whole world had run on tight structure for years — you knew exactly what excellent looked like, because somebody had already written it down and made you say it back. Then I got out, and none of that translated onto a resume line a civilian recruiter could read. The only door that opened was the mailroom at a big financial company, so that's the door I walked through. I spent my first few weeks learning a company the strange way — through its outgoing mail, which...
3 months ago • 2 min read