Three years at Tripoint, a retrospective

We work under a year to year award, so the end of every fiscal year comes with a little cloud over it. Well, we might not actually get it this year. That cloud has been sitting on me lately and I'm having a very strong sense of deja vu. It's the same feeling I had during my previous periods of job uncertainty, and sitting here with it, I've had to admit I've done a poor job of heeding my own lessons learned.

I've done this twice before, once when I left Bridgestone and once when I left USDA. The lessons are the same seven. Only the grades have changed, and mostly not for the better.

This is not a judgment about the current job or contract but a self assessment of how well I've done at implementing my previously stated career lessons learned.

Take savings seriously. Six months of living expenses #

Ugh. No. I still don't have anything close to six months of expenses put away.

Last time I told myself the problem was motivation, that it's just really hard to work on this without the threat of a job change hanging over my head. I've been chewing on that excuse and it doesn't survive contact with the facts. I've been on a year to year award this entire time. The threat has been hanging over my head for three straight years, and I still didn't build it. So I don't think I get to blame motivation for this one.

Grit and discipline are the only levers I can think of, and yeah, try harder is a pretty weak plan. Maybe the fix is the same shape as my resume rule below (make it automatic) so it stops depending on how motivated I feel in a given month.

Grade: D

Be genuine and mindful about relationships at work #

I'm just naturally a genuine and earnest person, so I feel like I do pretty well at this without trying. I no longer just want to be the nerd in the server room making the blinking lights blink. I nurture relationships and I try to be in front of the people making decisions. Not in a fake, ass kissy way, but in a genuine, I'm bringing value to our team way.

Grade: A

Maintain professional relationships outside work, intentionally #

For the first couple of years I was making it a point to go into the office every 2 or 3 months, just to show my face and rub shoulders with other humans. Plus, I do love a happy hour. 😎

Otherwise, I've done poorly here too. How do I check in with people I used to work with without seeming like a fake glad hander?? Ugh.

Writing this out, I think I've had the answer sitting in the next section the whole time. If I'm writing publicly about the work, the people I used to work with can find me without me having to send anybody a "hey, just checking in!" message. The post does the checking in. That feels a lot more like me than working a room does.

Grade: D

Keep the resume current regardless of employment status #

I've touched my resume only a couple of times in the three years since joining the current contract. Usually right after something at work really irritated me, which is not the cadence I want to keep.

I think the lever I can pull here is a quarterly reminder on my calendar. So, new rule for myself: every 1st day of a new season (spring, summer, fall, winter) I review my resume and make sure it's still current and relevant.

Grade: C-

Build and nurture the network on LinkedIn, recruiters included #

Ugh. Again, no, I've not done a good job at this. It's hard to keep up with LinkedIn, but I'm going to try harder by making a couple of changes.

1. Write more on my blog about work topics, and syndicate those posts to LinkedIn.
2. Be mindful and attentive about adding work people as I meet them. Do not go on an adding spree only when I'm thinking about job changes.

So, this post is me starting on number one.

Grade: F

Adjust the dev workflow to include GitHub #

No. I'm intentionally deciding not to carry this one forward. Scrubbing contract specific details out of work scripts is more risk than I want to take on, and that friction is exactly why it never happened at USDA either. That's twice now, so I think I'm just going to call it.

What I noticed while writing this, though, is that I've been doing the actual thing this lesson was reaching for. Just not on GitHub. I keep Doxipedia, my Power Platform and SharePoint reference, and I've been adding to it since my Bridgestone days (nothing fancy, it's just where I put things so I don't have to solve them twice). It's public, it's on my own site, and it comes from the same instinct that made me write down lesson 6 in the first place: work in public, share what you know. The lesson wasn't wrong. The venue was.

So I'm retiring GitHub as the mechanism and keeping the goal. More work writing here, more of it findable, and pushed out to LinkedIn.

Grade: N/A

Document processes and projects like I'm about to leave #

I think I've done a pretty good job of this one at the current contract. Every process, audit procedure, and internal script has an SOP or runbook to go with it. I'm actually proud of that. Discoverability for the team could be better, but the documents exist, they're current, and they're well written.

This is the lesson I added at the end of my USDA retro, so this is the first time I've graded it. Nice to start with a good one.

Grade: A

Conclusion #

Look at the grades, and a pattern falls out that I didn't expect and don't love.

Work relationships: A. Documentation: A. Savings: D. Relationships outside work: D. Resume: C-. LinkedIn: F.

Everything on this list that serves the team or the work, I do well. Everything that only serves me, I don't. I'm good at doing the job and being decent to the people around me, and I'm bad at every single part that's about protecting myself. I don't think that's a scheduling problem or a motivation problem. It's just what I care about, showing up in a report card.

Work isn't just work for me. I've read people say your job isn't supposed to be your identity, but I can't help it. I think my personality type is tech lead. I'm a geeky, curious person who likes to solve problems and share what I know with people. The stuff I'm bad at is the stuff that only matters when I'm on my way out the door, and apparently some part of me refuses to plan for that.

I'd like to be wrong about that being permanent. So: the resume goes on the calendar, the writing happens here, and the savings account is the one I have to figure out.

How do you handle the parts of your career that only pay off when you're leaving? Do you have an actual system, or are you like me, promising yourself you'll do better next time?