I won’t bury the lede: I’m retiring! After literally 30+ years working as a system administrator, manager, director, and general thinking-oriented person, I am hanging up my last employee badge and riding off into the sunset. I told my team last week, and May 28th will be my very last day.
It’s a big step. Yes, I’m excited. Yes, I’m also nervous. S. and I were the right combination of lucky and talented to be able to retire comfortably at a relatively early age; after a lot of discussions with professionals over the last six months or so we decided it was better to take the leap and maximize our personal time in the decades remaining. Pokémon has been a good place to work, but my anarchistic self has never actually been all that comfortable as a manager despite the fact that I’m very good at it.
And really, the current job market makes me even less comfortable. The zero-rate interest rate policy era was good for tech workers. I really liked being able to be tell unhappy direct reports that they might be happier somewhere else and have it be meaningful. That’s not even a hypothetical — I had one guy once who told me he was interested in finding out what it was like at one of the really big companies, so I helped him with interview prep and choosing targets. Worked out well for him and for me, because he‘s in a position to learn things he wouldn’t have learned working for me at that company and I didn’t have someone wondering about greener grass.
But if I say that now, it’s bullshit because the jobs aren’t out there, and if I have unhappy people working for me I know they might be sticking around for purely economic reasons despite their unhappiness. That sucks. (For them more than me, I know.) I don’t like the power dynamic.
This attitude of mine is one reason why I wouldn’t ever have been a good VP-level executive. I’ve never been comfortable pushing people as hard as I’d need to push them. It’s a flaw I’m pretty content with. Modesty aside, I’m capable of being inspiring enough to compensate for it at the director level.
So what are our plans?
First up: moving to Minneapolis/St. Paul. Yeah, we know it gets cold in the winter. Nope, no family out there. We’re flying out to the Twin Cities for a week in June to find an apartment on the skyways, and we’ll spend a year there before making any final decisions. The city seems simpatico from a culture standpoint with at least one world class repertory cinema, good food, and of course a great music scene. I already have tickets for the Sugar reunion tour at First Ave. It’ll be a bit weird not living next to an ocean; we hope the lakes will make up for it. And there’s a world class airport right there, which is important for travel.
We plan to move in August. Lots to do, plenty of time to do it. If you’ve ever wanted to buy a nice townhouse in North Seattle, let me know, I guess. We are already getting the cats used to longer drives.
We’re also hitting Fantasia in July. 30th anniversary and all — it’s a bit tricky to carve a week out of the move prep but it’s an important festival for me and we enjoy it a ton. We’re really looking forward to getting to see Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma early.
More generally I’m trying to figure out how I will structure my time. Lotus eating is attractive and I will absolutely do some of that. Will I wind up seeing over a thousand movies in a year one of these years? Yeah, probably; I am not wired to resist that sort of challenge. I still don’t want to lose track of what day of the week it is.
So I anticipate volunteering, both at that great cinema I linked above and for local causes. Not as if Minneapolis is short on places where volunteers can be useful. I’m hoping the tech skills come in handy and I’m happy to show up at a food bank and hand out cans — whatever’s useful.
I want to write more, hopefully some of it with S. It’ll be time to find out if I can produce coherent TTRPG material; perhaps it’s just the day job that’s been getting in my way. You’re gonna hear a lot here about the move and how we settle into the new city. Words are good.
We need to find a gaming group. Minneapolis is good for gaming for sure. (And GameHole Con is suddenly a fairly easy drive away.) I expect to have to put in the work here; I’m sketching out ideas for an ongoing one-shot night, which ought to be a good way to meet compatible gamers.
I may podcast. I have some ideas I’ve been rattling around for a while; again, perhaps the day job was the big blocker. Time will tell.
I’m gonna pick up a very lightweight form of GTD just for the sake of structure.
And who knows? I can’t imagine going back to the kind of work I used to do; I can certainly imagine doing some consulting. I’m a Swiss Army Knife technologist, which sometimes makes me a lumpy fit for a full time role but great for a few months if someone has a specific time-boxed challenge.
We’ll see what happens. I’m excited about all of it.