How it ended - Take 2

Here’s what seems like the more politically correct or self reflective version of how my career at Microsoft ended. It may also be more divisive.

I went from someone obsessed with the job, to someone who didn’t want to do it anymore.

I went from someone that could do anything, to someone that could do nothing.

I went from someone propelled by self-doubt to someone who is at peace.

I went from someone crushed by anxiety to someone traumatized by it.

I went from someone who was “a guy” to someone who was an afterthought.

You can stop reading now, you probably get the gist of it.

I went from someone obsessed with the job, to someone who didn’t want to do it anymore

For various reasons (which I’ve detailed elsewhere), I’ve had a love/hate relationship with work. At certain points in my career, I really just wanted to “stop” and in fact I did that twice for short periods. But this time was different, beyond working with the people on my team, I really did not care for the day to day details of the job. This had happened to me before, but I always got “hooked” after spending a couple months in the details. That never happened in my last position.

I went from someone that could do anything, to someone that could do nothing

Throughout my career, I prided myself as someone who was very adaptable. No one on the team knows “blah”, I’ll figure it out. “Blah” was one of many technical things or one of many product/process things. I loved learning new things and was fearless. I often got in trouble for overstepping my bounds and taking on work that wasn’t mine. In my last position, however, I found I could do nothing. Production definitions - not the SME. Planning process - no org interest. Feature ideation - beyond my skill set.

I went from someone propelled by self-doubt to someone who is at peace

It’s like this - I’ll never dunk a basketball and I’m ok with that. I can dribble, pass, and score. Boy, can I score. All the years not thinking I was good enough, made me push myself harder to prove that I could metaphorically dunk that basketball. A nice thing about getting older, at least for me, is the self acceptance of what I can do. Some may see this as conflicting with “growth mindset”, I see it as complementary.

I went from someone crushed by anxiety to someone traumatized by it

I’ve always felt tremendous pressure at work. Pressure to perform, especially in public forums. I would think/fret about a talk I was giving for months. I’d be filled with adrenaline for a routine product review. When I was younger, it seemed I could recover from the anxiety. Like my body could process it better, maybe like a young person does with alcohol. As I entered my 50s, the anxiety became deliberating. The amount of effort to prepare. The failed attempts. The time to recover.

I went from someone who was “a guy” to someone who was an afterthought

On every team I’ve been on, I’ve been a leader. I didn’t always start out as a leader, but it always came and I had confidence that if I put in the work, I would become “a guy”. It always happened that way, until the last team I was a part of. It didn’t happen on this last team for reasons above plus another very important reason. I had no leadership allies, no one who believed in me, no one who would say “Vince, he’s good” when my name came up in a conversation. When I first joined Microsoft, I was exactly what the organization needed - a multi discipline engineer who knew how to get stuff done. By the time I left, I was the last of my kind.