Today marks another big day in my career, it’s the day I arrive in my remote office for my first day at Broadcom. But so much has happened since my literal Day 1 at AWS back in March 2021. On that day. I knew my life was getting ready to change – I was taking a massive step in my career. I had landed my dream job, at last working as an architect in a public cloud role for a big tech company. I hit many career goals all at once with this role, and I couldn’t have been more excited and optimistic about my future. I was beaming and I couldn’t wait to get started. What I didn’t realize was, my optimistic bubble would soon burst.
I had an existential crisis. Here I had landed my dream job, but I discovered it wasn’t so dreamy. It was far more difficult and uncomfortable than I had anticipated. Sure I was growing. I was learning by leaps and bounds, and I was working with some of the best talent in the industry (many on my team!). But my introverted nature found the Solutions Architect role very challenging in a highly demanding environment. Perhaps it was too large of a change too quickly. For many years I shied away from sales, and here I was smack in the middle of it. And Amazon is known for it’s obsessive culture – a very different pace from the small business culture I had been exposed to throughout my career. In short, I had gotten to what I thought was the pinnacle of my career, but I realized this wasn’t exactly what I hoped it would be, and I lost something dear to me. I lost the one thing that always keeps me excited and continually spurred me on, and that was Hope.
For most of my career, I dreamed of landing an amazing role at a hot tech company. And I yearned to expand my tech skills into public cloud (my mantra for skills development in previous years was “cloud, containers, and code”). The dream was always down the road – “One day I’ll (blank), and then I will have arrived.” I found the journey incredibly satisfying and fulfilling because I was working toward that dream. But once I actually arrived and realized this wasn’t quite what I expected, I didn’t know what to do. I found myself lost because I no longer had hope. I suddenly started thinking about years to retirement because that’s all I had to look forward to. I didn’t have a larger career goal to work for. I didn’t like where I was, but I didn’t know where to go. I was at the top of the peak with nothing higher to strive for. That which kept me going through my career was gone. And on top of all that, I was burning out. Something had to change.
Seems very clear now, but at the time I overlooked something important. I was at the top of one peak, with no perceived path to climb higher, but that wasn’t the only peak to climb. AWS was an amazing career accelerator and it would eventually open many doors for me. I just needed to be patient. One day, while talking with one of my VMware counterparts (we regularly worked side by side with VMware SAs), he shared news of an opening at VMware. At the time, I thought I was starting to get used to the pace and the role at AWS – not quite comfortable, but I was making peace with it. Furthermore, I thought my VMware dreams had dissipated when the news broke in May 2022 of Broadcom’s intent to acquire VMware. Many people were leaving VMware including two top SAs that left VMware to join my team at AWS. It seemed they were running away from the fire, so why I would entertain the idea of running *into* the fire. But, something the hiring manager at VMware said kept resonating in my head: “work-life balance”. He knew the rigors of AWS and enticed me with the allure of restoring balance. My wife kept telling me, she wanted to see me nights and weekends. She wanted me to get my life back. So, I decided to take the plunge, apply for the role, and ultimately, I got the offer that would finally land me another dream role: A Cloud Solutions Architect at VMware!
I’m happy to share that my time at VMware restored hope and joy in my career. I’ll write another post about my journey since I started at VMware in September 2022. In short, it’s been awesome. But I’ll wrap up this post with this lesson learned. Our dreams and goals can often take us to unexpected places. Yes, there’s the old adage that we should be careful about what we wish for because we just might receive it. But I learned that our goals and dreams never stop once we arrive. And if we accomplish something and it’s not what we expect, we must get clear on what’s not right and strive to change it. Keep setting new goals. Fulfillment comes from growth and relationships. Growth is a key element, and that comes from continually finding new goals and pressing on. There is never any reason to lose hope because there is always something greater. And sometimes, we just need to change our location to gain a better view or even have someone open the blinds for us to reveal there is far more out there. Never lose hope!