Because of my own personal reaction (usually shock and worry) every time I see a female engineering leader go through a reduction in scope, a non-promotion-related role change, or an outright departure, and because of my own desire to make it easier to support each other with changes and growth, …

If this sounds familiar to you at all, it’s because it is exactly how I started a similar post a year or so ago. At that time, I’d decided to move to an individual contributor role from a director one. And it has been one wild year, yet still the obstacles exceed the energy I choose to put towards tackling them, so I’ve decided to take an even bigger turn now, and am leaving GitHub.

And tech.

My resume across three decades starts with me, as a young temp, thinking I could whip together a little system for folks to do their own data entry for me – and I did just that, and got everyone in that company using it including the executives. And it wrapped up with me helping assemble and deliver the tooling and strategy to more easily keep platforms and their teams healthy. Speaking of, it is hard to not associate recent outages with what seems like tech companies racing with reckless abandon towards AI and profits in general. Interestingly enough, my decision to look for something else came the day before the Crowdstrike outage, and my last day is the day after the current Verizon outage, reaffirming that DX, quality, and reliability are vitally important to us all. Tech is a tool, but it should not be our only tool, and it should definitely be treated as if it could be destructive. I hope that people will continue to push for sustainable development and operations practices, and that the market somehow corrects to better reinforce the need to handle our customers’ trust and our employees’ experiences with care.

I am still a sucker for growth opportunities. Sometimes they come at me without checking if I want them first. 😅 In this case, once again, I chose it. And it was not an easy decision. I’d previously taken all the time and effort to work through my identity issues, and I’d accomplished the goal with that of working decent hours. And I’ve already worked through not seeing changes like this as a failure to meet my goals. What made it hard to decide if I stay at GitHub and figure it out, or move on an tackle something else, was being so convinced that I had no viable options to consider, given the number of available employees on the market and my age and experience. Without another job, I was sure I’d destroy my future and ruin my family – I had some serious money drama to work through. 😬

That wasn’t the only thing keeping me in place, though, because I am and always will be a GitHub superfan. But once I let go of that limiting belief that I was doomed if I didn’t figure out how to stay and thrive, then I started seeing just how many other options there truly are. And I thought deeply about what brings me joy (learning, connecting with people, having a purpose, taking healthy amounts of unstructured time) and was honestly amused noticing how little of my time anymore went towards these things at work or outside of it.

I’m not sharing this to try to influence others to go on a similar path – just the opposite. I spent 30 years in tech because I loved it, I absolutely went out of my way to help my teams and customers because tech can help us so much when it’s done right, and we need people to help do it right. Plus I really identified with the smart and quirky community of engineers more than any other community I am part of. No, this is more of a reminder to work hard and focus on who you want to become overall, and balance balance balance to have and share the best human experiences. Tech should support this, and it’s up to all involved to make sure it does.

And now I’m off to my next adventure! I’ll be opening a local small business, providing various services to improve our quality of life, especially for us aging folks and others otherwise disabled or injured – two communities I have been directly involved in for years as a primary caregiver for my 85yo mother and my 19yo disabled son. I’m terrified, I’m going for broke, I’ll miss all of the tech folks I got to interact with on the regular all over the world and the nerd cred that comes with being in the industry, and I’m incredibly excited all at once. I intend to write about it aplenty, so stay tuned …