Giving Five Months Notice

The standard advice is to give two weeks notice when you leave a job. Sometimes you might add an extra week, or subtract a few days, but two weeks is normal in America. I am not someone who is ever called standard or normal, so I recently gave five months notice.

Myself and the other leaders on my team have worked hard at is building psychological safety. We strived to create an environment where hard conversations can take place. This includes discussions about ways our job isn’t nurturing and rewarding. For the last few months, I’ve been feeling like my position wasn’t doing it for me. Through coaching and mentorship, I had been able to promote multiple people to do a lot of what my old job entailed. I tried searching internally for a way to evolve my role, but there are no further opportunities for my growth inside my team. So now it’s team to look outward.

My plan is to finish up the year at Penske Media Corporation. We are almost done with our primary rollout of Gutenberg. I’m overseeing a big RFP. There is still some growth in my team members I would like to help them achieve. After that, I’m going to travel and take a break. I spent a lot of the pandemic overworking myself and would like to put some time and energy into myself and some passion projects.

While I am open to any discussions (you can get in touch), I am not looking to start a new role until at least Q2 of 2023. The things that most interest me are the challenges of how to scale an engineering team and how to make the lives of people better. I have long focused on developer productivity and happiness (since they go hand in hand). And trying to make the internet usable and enjoyable for everyone. Wherever I end up, I hope it’s one where I can continue to do that.

When I joined PMC, we had less than half the number of engineers we have today. The team was homogeneous and the skill set concentrated in backend WordPress. Four years later, that has completely changed. We now have the largest in-house WordPress team that I know of. We are the publisher that contributes the most to the WordPress project.

I am thankful to have had the opportunity to help so many people grow, find their superpowers, and become better engineers. Now it’s time to find the next group. But no matter how it goes down, it is unlikely to be standard or normal.