Career lessons learned through experience

Missing familiar people in a new job made me briefly confuse homesickness for evidence that I had made the wrong career decision.

Being new can feel like being left out. But sometimes, you’re not being excluded. You’re just missing the backstory. You don’t have to pretend you get it. Ask. People are usually more willing to explain than you think.

Writing an angry message felt private until I sent it to the person I was angry about.

A skills gap is often more temporary than it feels, but it is better to be honest about what you know and then close the gap.

New authority tends to make people grip tighter, but tighter control reads to the team as distrust, whatever the intention behind it actually is.

A redundancy offer is a number you can actually calculate, while staying somewhere out of fear is a number you can't - compare the real terms on the table, not just how uncertain the alternative feels.

Sunk cost is supposed to be the thing you don't do, the trap, the irrational decision. I know that. I've read the thing. But I also think there's something in finishing stuff just because you said you would, even when the reason you started was basically random, even when the subject stopped mattering almost immediately. I'm not totally sure I believe that. Some mornings I don't believe it at all.

I think about this more than I probably should. The thing I took from it was that splitting bills is not the same as being ready to actually live alongside someone, and rent going up is not a reason on its own to make a decision that size. I knew that. I think I knew that before I even wrote down those two columns of figures on the envelope. The maths was real, the pressure was real, but there was something underneath all of it where I was also just, I wanted to. I wanted to live with him. I was using the practical stuff as cover for a decision I'd already made emotionally and hadn't really examined. That's the part that's harder to say. The rent was just a reason that sounded like the kind of reason adults give.

I don't actually know what the lesson is. That commute time calculations are meaningless? That spreadsheets are a way of feeling in control without being in control? Maybe. I don't know. I keep thinking about the spreadsheet.

Well meaning advice is still just advice. I think I knew what I knew and I let someone else's certainty feel louder than mine. That's the part I keep coming back to, not her, just that.

I don't think feeling ready is actually a thing that happens on its own without doing the thing. That sounds obvious now and I'd have told you that back then too, in theory, like yes of course you learn by doing, very wise, very agreed. But I made the decision anyway. I think I believed my own readiness was something I could tell from the inside, that I'd know when it arrived, like a bus. It didn't arrive. Or maybe it did arrive and I thought it was a different bus. I genuinely cannot tell anymore. The strange part is I look back and I can't work out if I was right or wrong. Maybe I would have been a terrible team lead. Maybe I would have been fine. Maybe I'd have hated it. I hated managing people at a previous job and I'd sort of forgotten that when the offer came up, which is a fun thing to have remembered later. So maybe I was protecting myself from something I didn't consciously know I remembered. Or maybe I just bottled it and invented a reason. Both versions feel true at different times of day.

I think I thought avoiding it would mean I didn't have to feel it. But it's still there, it's just harder to get to now. Like it didn't go anywhere, it just moved to somewhere I can't really reach without making a whole thing of it and I don't know how to do that over text at 11pm.

I think she just wanted somebody on the other end of the line. The claim, the paperwork, all of it was basically beside the point. I know that sounds obvious but I didn't really get it at the time, I was nineteen and annoyed about my Tuesdays. The reason for calling was almost like a prop she needed to hold onto in order to make the call feel legitimate.

I think I knew even at 17 that leaving someone on read when they were being genuinely nice was not a great thing to do. I just thought it was the kind of bad thing that evaporates. Turns out industries are a lot smaller than they look from a school common room.

How you describe your last job is apparently used to model how you will describe this one. I understand the logic, I would probably apply the same filter myself. I still think I was right about the Friday in March. I think both of those things are true at the same time.

I used to think that if you knew your trade well enough, that was enough. Keep your head down, do good work, word gets around. And maybe that's true in some contexts. But there was something in having to explain it, having to find the words for the muscle memory, that made me understand my own knowledge differently. Like I'd had a shelf full of stuff I'd just been reaching into for years and suddenly I had to sort it, label it, work out what was actually there. Some of it I found I didn't understand as well as I'd assumed. Some of it I understood better than I'd given myself credit for. I don't know if I'd call it a lesson exactly. More like something I noticed and then couldn't un-notice.

I don't think the five grand was ever really the reason. Probably some mix of not trusting a feeling I had in a car park, and something like pride. I do think growth matters more than the number, especially early on.

I don't know if there's a clean takeaway. I think the honest version is that staying quiet felt like self-protection and it did protect me from some things, from being wrong in public, from being dismissed, from a specific kind of embarrassment I am still quite afraid of. But it also meant years of ideas just dissolving. Not every idea was worth saying. Some of them were probably bad. But I didn't know which were which because I never tested them, so they all just went. I think that's the bit I actually regret, not any individual meeting, just the aggregate of all the undissaid things.

It's just a different job. I knew that the way you know something before you know it. Knowing it the other way took longer.

I would never have left on my own. I was too settled, too used to the routine, the coffee order, all of it. Sometimes being pushed is the only way you go anywhere. I think. I am not totally sure that is true.

You can optimise your environment until you've removed everything that was annoying, and then keep going until you've removed everything else too.

I don't know what I took from it exactly. I do the last round now and then I go home. Most nights I'm back before midnight. That's something, I think.

I think I was scared of interviewing. Scared of someone saying it out loud. So I just never checked.

I kept waiting for a stretch of free time that never showed up. The hour I had was the hour I had.