Freed by 50

For the past year I have written about needing to make a change at my job. Things have been getting progressively worse since our department fell under the “leadership” of a largely unqualified individual. For one reason or another, this person had an issue with my team and was slowly dismantling it. This week I found out that they’ve decided to take me, my team, my peer and his team, and ship us off to another department. That department has one of the worst reputations in the company.

This is a death sentence.

In the coming months, if past experience holds, what remains of these two teams will be slowly replaced by offshore roles. The systems that we run will be given to teams who don’t understand the technology, and will ultimately be replaced by external vendor products in order to justify the creation of a new application administration team. My coworker and I will eventually be PIP’d (performance improvement plan) under suspect circumstances and given impossible goals to ensure we can’t survive the PIP.

This is the unfortunate reality of life in big enterprise corporations and the games of politics that are played.

I’m obviously upset about this. I’ve worked for the better part of a decade to build multiple teams, products, and internal systems that have positively impacted millions of people. I’ve enjoyed helping dozens of people launch or grow their careers. I’ve see my own career grow well beyond anything I could have imagined ten years ago. To see so much of it dismantled at the whim of a single individual who doesn’t even understand the impact is very difficult.

Under ideal circumstances, I probably have six months left before I’m ushered out. It could be as few as three. I’m looking for new roles in the company, and slowly starting to realize that I may need to leave entirely. This is again difficult since I haven’t had to actively look for a job in ten years. And even more so because I’m only three years from financial independence.

I am still in the sad/angry stages of grief which makes it hard to move forward. I can see four paths ahead right now:

1. I find a new role within the company (this is hard to do right now), get approval from my new management (also difficult to do) and transfer. Unfortunately this means leaving my team to fend for themselves.
2. I find a new job with another company. This is also a difficult road, but the highest agency path to take. I’ve already reached out to former coworkers and friends in the industry. You’d think with 25 years in the field and 10 years at my company I could parlay my experience into another management job elsewhere, but…well…I’ve never done it before. I was a jack of all trades developer when I started at my job and now I’ve been a Director for six years.
3. Through some crazy series of events I’m not let go and spend the next three years unhappily kicked around this new department. I half-heartedly work on projects that aren’t very exciting and wake up every day wondering if it’s the day they let me go. This is the laziest and saddest path I could take. It would mean very little agency, and simply riding out 36 months of misery until I’m FI and quit.
4. I ride this out until they let me go. With 10 years tenure I’m owed 20 weeks severance, plus I’m told some people get to vest out their next quarter’s RSU’s. That’s a significant chunk of change I’d be given if they decided to cut ties. Between that and my emergency fund I would have over a year of expenses covered. For some reason I find this appealing except for the whole having no job or health insurance thing.

Of course things could be much worse.

I haven’t been let go, and I still have a job and a team. The paychecks are still coming, and unless they cut me by next week, RSU’s are still vesting. I have an opportunity to figure out a plan over the next few weeks, and I’ve already applied to several internal roles.

If there’s a lesson in all of this, it’s that spending the effort to do the right things financially make things like this infinitely easier. Earlier in my career I would be in a full on panic. Any interruption in my paychecks would have been a disaster. Twice in my career it was. Scrambling to get any job available in order to pay the bills is a terrible situation to be in.

Thanks to my obsession with financial security, my only debts are a small mortgage and a car about to be paid off. We’ve lived off about half of my take home for so long, that A- we have a ton of money saved and invested, and B- I can be very flexible with future jobs. I’m close enough to FI that I could probably slow down my contributions anyway, but if I needed to stop them altogether, it wouldn’t be the end of the world.

As the title says, this is bad. My mental state isn’t great right now and my job is full of uncertainty, but I’m still employed and thanks to FI I have a lot of options that don’t require a full on panic. It could be worse.