Moving on

After more than ten years, my time at Clarity Innovations has come to an end. I was laid off.

I want to say up front that I enjoyed working there. Ten years is a long time to spend anywhere, and I would not have spent it there if I had not wanted to.

Nobody’s fault

This was not my fault, and it was not theirs.

An enormous amount of money was poured into education technology over the last decade. When that kind of money stops, things do not just go back to the way they were – it leaves a vacuum. That is the economy we are in right now. A lot of good people are getting the same news I got, for the same reasons.

I am not going into specifics, but what I will say about Clarity is that they care about their employees, and they showed it in the way they handled this. I had notice. I had time to say goodbye. That is not nothing – plenty of people find out their access has been revoked before they find out they have been let go.

Missing the fellowship

The hardest part is the people.

Ten years is long enough that your coworkers stop being coworkers. You know whose kid is graduating high school. You know who to ping when a build breaks at 4:45 on a Friday and who will actually answer. You develop a shorthand that takes years to build.

I will miss them. I expect to keep missing them for a while. That is the cost of having liked the job.

Gathering my strength

The other thing the notice period gave me was time to remember what I can actually do.

When you work somewhere long enough, your skills stop being visible to you. They just become the furniture. All of your expertise gets expressed as institutional memory.

So I spent some of that time going back through ten years of work and reminding myself what was in it.

Your fingers would remember their old strength better, if they grasped your sword.

They do, as it turns out. It just takes picking the thing back up. Though I will not be enumerating the past here – I have too much to do.

Everything is out of date

Here is the genuinely worst part of being laid off after a decade, and nobody warns you about it: everything is stale. Every artifact of your professional existence was last touched during an administration that has since ended.

The list, as it currently stands:

• Resume
• Personal site
• This blog
• LinkedIn profile
• Drupal, GitHub, and GitLab profiles

None of it is hard. All of it is archaeology. Each one means sitting down and reconstructing what I actually did across ten years, which loops right back to the previous section – the work of updating the resume is the work of remembering the strength.

Silver shores

I am going to be fine. I know that.

Ten years was a good long stay, and I am grateful for it, but the road does go ever on. There are worse things than finding yourself at the harbor with the sails already up.

It is about time for another adventure.