Escape From Alcatraz

Here's a gist of my working experience. In 2003, I joined the company that I interned with. Not long after I joined, the company was bought over by a bigger company. For a span of 18 odd years, I had stayed on, merely changing subsidiaries along the way. With each change, came a change of management, a change of line of business, a change of domain. There was some career progression up till a certain point. But the flexible nature of the organization made it not very clear. People often wonder why I stayed so long when I never got a single proper bonus payout. Loyal? Content? Afraid of change? Too well-paid? Somehow, I made it through laaaa. The past 4 years were the most challenging. We tried to do anything and everything under the sun, under the guise of being 'dynamic'. And from what I saw, it was mostly a waste of time. In the end, I ended up in a subsidiary that had more than fifty different clients with at least fifty different installations. The mountain of problems that cropped up far exceeded our capability to solve them. We were in firefighting mode every day and we still tried to talk about product roadmap and doing unfamiliar things. At the group level, unprofitable subsidiaries were hunted and killed. After two rounds of  'mutual separation schemes' and a few rounds of resignations, we were down to a skeleton crew. Management paid an external consultant a few hundred thousand bucks to give us advice that we didn't follow. With no clear strategy, we just knew we had numbers to make. Teams were just there to push work around. Things were stagnating. Sounds really bad, right? 

During sunnier days, I mostly ignored headhunters. But 2021 really got to me. In July, a colleague (now ex-colleague) of mine contacted me about an opportunity. He was helping his girlfriend fill out a position. I took her call and it wasn't hard for her to convince me to apply for the role although it as in a completely different industry. In a short time, a second interview was arranged, and I got the job! The pull factor was good, and the push factor even greater. Signed the offer letter, so the next step was to resign!