It's hard to believe, but Diana just reached her 10-year anniversary working at Dr. Phillips Center For The Performing Arts. She wasn't full-time until recently, but she has been a house manager for more time than she wasn't. Combined with years of being Broadway subscribers, and then founding donors in 2021, it's crazy how connected we are to that place. While it's certainly not puppies and rainbows every day at work for her, what a privilege to work in a place that so many people have an emotional attachment to, and have emotional experiences in.
Meanwhile, I'm just a few weeks away from hitting my third anniversary at my job, which will be a new record for me. As I'm sure people who are close to me know, working in technology can involve a strangely ephemeral job cycle. Part of that is because of contract work, which I think I've done for about four years out of my career. You know those gigs are finite in length. But I've also worked for countless smaller companies that are financial question marks, owned by private equity or otherwise fickle about retention. The other thing is that it's often difficult to advance in terms of career growth or salary in this line of work by staying put. At smaller companies, it's because there's nowhere to go, and at larger companies, well, they're just corporate machines that get rigid in structure.
While three years will be a new record for me, I'm not anxious to go elsewhere. Work is definitely challenging at times, and sometimes it's not. That's where I am in terms of career. I have ideas about what the "ideal" role for me might be, but they're positions that don't really exist in most places. I do know that I don't think I want to go up to a director level in a company this size, because it's too far from the technology. In a smaller company, I could be a "VP" but still involved in tech decisions, but that becomes less and less so as companies get bigger. For the size I'm at, I've got a solid balance of technology, leadership, mentorship and, sometimes, influence. It's satisfying. Some companies don't even use technical people in management positions (like Disney).
I can't predict how long it will last, but I hope the answer is "years." That's the other thing about technology, is that when things change, they tend to change quickly. A bad quarter, changes in investors, economic shifts, restructuring, etc., can happen at any time. But my former boss was with the company for a decade, through various mergers and changes, so you never know. I've been fortunate even to have most of the same team, and even more fortunate to enjoy working with them because they were not my hires. Here's hoping for more anniversaries.
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