In therapy the other day (reminder: therapy is great and more of us should go 🙂) I had a realization about the three times in my career I left a job without another one lined up. Yes, three. Nope, didn't have a backup plan. I financially prepped for the last one, because I recognized it was coming - I could feel myself about to hit a wall. There was only so long I could do my job well enough, look for something new, and keep it together before something gave and for me it was always the job. Maybe there's a post about burnout somewhere in here. Anyway.
All three times I ended up in roles I absolutely would not have considered if I'd stayed and quiet quit instead. I've been turning over why, because it wasn't only skill or luck. I think it's because during those breaks I let myself follow whatever threads were remotely interesting to me and just... maximized the time I spent doing things that brought me joy.
By the time I was ready to search again I approached it in kind of the same way - open to things I'd have ruled out or just never thought to consider. I stopped filtering my destination through the job titles I thought I should be targeting. Instead I looked for roles that would let me do what I knew and loved, regardless of what they were called. During those breaks, I didn't see the possibilities clearly enough to limit myself to them and it turned out that was the whole point.
Which, again, not a strategy I'd recommend.
But having made that connection I'm using that learned experience to step into the unknown again in the hopes of bigger and better. Not a career break this time, though 🤪
At work I’m leading the charge on rebuilding our product delivery lifecycle from first principles with AI as a first-class citizen. We're in early stages and my instinct keeps being to start from what EPD folks have traditionally done and figure out how to map it onto the new thing. It's the wrong instinct and that connection I made in therapy is exactly why.
AI is transforming software development into a whole new world and slapping AI onto our -current- PDLC to augment our -current- responsibilities to work through our -current- processes and phases that produce our -current- outputs will not be what gets us there. I think what will is embracing the unknown about what AI will do to our current work with curiosity and keeping our goals centered on care - for the humans using the software, and for the humans building it.
I'm still sitting with this, so no clean wrap up from me. But I'm giving a talk at MoTaCon this year and I think this thread is where it's headed.