I didn’t set out to leave. That’s the part that doesn’t fit cleanly into the narrative people expect when you tell them you accepted a new job after eight years somewhere.
The honest version is that it crept up on me. The work I’d spent years building, the foundations I’d laid, the systems I’d designed from scratch and maintained and defended and improved, they were done. Mature. Running. And the environment around them had shifted in ways that made it harder and harder to build anything new. The days started filling up with reactive triage instead of design, and I didn’t notice how much that had changed who I was at work until I found myself in an interview being asked what energized me most about security engineering, and I had to think about it longer than I should have.
That pause sat with me for days after.
The Part I Ignored for Too Long
There’s a particular kind of tired that doesn’t show up on a calendar or in a performance review. It’s not burnout in the dramatic sense, not the kind where you miss meetings or stop answering messages. It’s the slower version, where you open your laptop in the morning and feel the weight of the day before you’ve read a single thing. Where you catch yourself going through motions that used to feel like decisions. Where the work is technically fine, and technically fine is somehow the most defeating thing you can say about something you used to care about.
I was doing the job well. I know I was. The metrics said so, the people around me said so, and I had eight years of context that made me genuinely useful in ways that didn’t always have obvious replacements. But I’d stopped growing in the direction I actually wanted to grow, and instead of naming that clearly, I kept reframing it. I told myself it was a phase. That things would open back up. That the next quarter would be different. I ran that loop for longer than I’d like to admit, and the most honest thing I can say about it is that I think part of me knew, and another part wasn’t ready to do anything about it yet.
The curiosity that had always been my default mode, the instinct to pull things apart and figure out how to make them more secure, more durable, more considered, it was still there. It just didn’t have anywhere obvious to go, and I hadn’t figured out how to mourn that quietly without also deciding what to do about it.
Starting to Look
The decision to actually start looking wasn’t dramatic. There wasn’t a single moment or a final straw. It was more like a slow accumulation of evidence I kept filing away and then ignoring, until one afternoon I updated my profile on a whim, half-expecting to feel something dramatic, and mostly just felt relieved that I’d done it. Which was probably the signal I’d been waiting for without knowing it.
I told almost no one. My wife knew, because she’d been watching me carry something I couldn’t quite put into words for longer than I’d admitted even to myself, and she had the kind of patience with that process that I don’t think I’ve properly thanked her for. A few close friends knew in the vague sense of “he’s keeping his options open.” That was it. I wasn’t ready to have a half-formed conversation with anyone who might reasonably ask me what I was going to do next, because I didn’t have an answer yet, and I’ve never been good at sitting in the middle of something like that without something real to say.
And then the anxiety of the actual search kicked in and paranoid seemed like a reasonable baseline.
The job search is its own specific kind of emotional endurance test. You’re making yourself available for repeated evaluation by strangers on a timeline you don’t control, with information you don’t have, while trying to maintain the same level of performance at the job you currently have. You refresh your email more than you’d like to admit. You lie in bed running through answers to questions you haven’t been asked yet. You read job descriptions at 11pm and feel a complicated mix of excitement and “what if I’m not actually qualified for any of the things I think I’m qualified for,” which is a particularly unpleasant thought to have while trying to fall asleep.
I applied to a few things that went nowhere and filed that under useful calibration. I had a conversation that felt genuinely promising and then went quiet on their end, and I handled that with all the grace of someone who has NOT done this in eight years, which is to say I refreshed my inbox several more times than strictly necessary and then eventually accepted that silence was its own answer.
The Interviews
I hadn’t interviewed in eight years. That’s a long time to go without the experience of sitting in front of a panel and trying to distill the most meaningful parts of your career into coherent answers while also reading the room and also genuinely trying to figure out whether you even want the job. It’s a lot to run in parallel, and I was rusty in places I didn’t expect to be.
The technical questions were fine. The systems design stuff was fine. What I wasn’t prepared for was how much the behavioral questions would make me actually stop and account for what I’d been doing, as a person, for the last eight years. What have you built? What did you have to fight for? When was the last time you got something wrong and what did you do about it? Those questions don’t have scripted answers if you’re being honest, and being honest meant actually sitting with the material in a way I hadn’t done in a while.
There was one moment in a technical interview where I was describing something I’d built from scratch years ago, walking through the decisions, the tradeoffs, the things that didn’t work and had to be rebuilt, and somewhere in the middle of explaining it I remembered that I actually knew what I was doing. Not in a performance sense. In the sense of: this was real, I built it, it solved the actual problem, and the specificity of the experience is something that can’t be summarized into a resume line. That realization landed differently than I expected. Part confidence, part something that felt a lot like grief that I hadn’t been putting that capability somewhere it could grow.
I walked out of that one feeling good about it and then immediately started running through every answer I gave looking for things to be anxious about. Because of course I did.
The Offer
The offer came faster than I expected, and my first reaction was not the clean, uncomplicated elation you might anticipate. It was that plus a wave of “okay, this is real now,” and the immediate understanding that I was about to have the hardest conversation of my professional life.
The role was right. The team was sharp in the way that feels like a genuine signal rather than an interview performance. The work was exactly the kind of forward-looking, build-it-right work I’d been missing, the kind where the shape of the thing isn’t fully decided yet and you actually get to be part of deciding it. That’s the part that pulled hardest, if I’m being honest. Not the compensation, not the title, the fact that I’d be building something that was still being shaped instead of maintaining something that was fully formed and not going anywhere.
I accepted. And then I sat with that for a few hours before I felt ready to figure out what came next.
Telling People
I’ve thought about how to write this part carefully, because it’s the part that doesn’t resolve cleanly and I don’t want to pretend it does.
The team I was leaving wasn’t just a team. We’d been through circumstances together that tested all of us in ways I’m not going to detail here, and the people I was closest to understood exactly what this meant, including what it would leave behind. The person I’d reported to for all eight of those years, who had taught me more than I can reasonably attribute to any single source in my career, was going to find out that I was the next one to go.
That conversation was hard in a way I hadn’t fully prepared for. There was real pride in it, and real sadness in it, and the particular difficulty that comes from telling someone who invested in you that you’re moving on. Eight years of working closely with someone builds a shared language, and by the time that conversation was over, I think we both understood something that neither of us needed to say out loud. I don’t have a cleaner summary of it than that.
The goodbye messages were the most unexpectedly difficult part of the whole process. I kept starting sentences and deleting them because they didn’t feel like enough, because they WEREN’T enough, and eventually I accepted that they weren’t going to be enough and sent them anyway. Some of those people had been part of my daily context for years. Some of them I’d leaned on during things that had nothing to do with work. You don’t summarize that in a few paragraphs, and trying to felt like a small failure every time I hit send.
I don’t have a clean way to close that chapter. I don’t think you’re supposed to.
The First Day
I started the new job on a Monday. The first day was orientation and benefits enrollment and getting access to systems, which is a perfectly normal first day and also a slightly surreal one when you’ve spent the better part of a month in a heightened emotional state building toward it. There’s a specific flatness to doing security awareness training when your brain is still processing the weight of what you left behind, and I noticed that without judgment and moved through it.
The nervousness of the first week was different from the nervousness of the job search. The job search anxiety was about evaluation. This was more like the nervousness of wanting to get it right, wanting to be the version of myself that justified the offer, wanting to read the environment accurately before I started trying to contribute to it. I know how I work. I know that the instinct to understand a system before I try to change it is the right one. I know the relationships built in the first few weeks shape everything that comes after. I was applying things I actually know instead of performing them, and that felt different.
What I didn’t fully expect was how much lighter it would feel. Not immediately, and not without the weight of what I’d left behind still sitting somewhere in the background, but lighter in the way that moving toward something feels genuinely different from staying still out of inertia. I hadn’t realized how much of my energy had been going into maintaining the shape of things rather than building new ones, and getting that back wasn’t a dramatic revelation. It was just, oh, there it is. The thing I’d been missing.
I was running on loyalty and familiarity and genuine affection for people for longer than I was running on purpose. I don’t say that as a criticism of where I came from, because those things are real and they mattered, and they still do. But somewhere in the first few weeks of the new role I noticed that I was thinking about problems the way I used to think about problems, the kind of thinking that goes somewhere instead of circling. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed that until it was just there again, unremarkably, on a Tuesday.
I’m still figuring out what to do with all of it. The weight of leaving something you genuinely cared about doesn’t just resolve because the next thing is going well. I think it just finds somewhere to sit that isn’t right in the center of everything. That’s probably as much resolution as this gets.
I’m building again. That’s enough for now.