Career 7: A happy experience in my Career (v1.0)

When the company I was in was acquired, the acquiring company for some reason moved me from engineering in my old company to product management at the new company. 

At first, I resisted it as hard as I could but slowly, I settled in. After quite some time I was fine with it. I was passionate about helping customers and the field. I liked working with engineering without actually being a developer or an architect. There was also less stress than some other companies. 

As a general observation and aside, it is NOT technology that causes stress. It is people. It is up to you how you react to it and which environments you are willing to operate in and which you are not. You as an individual contributor cannot change the environment. YOU choose what YOU want to do. Management cannot force you to take a role you don't want to. You are free to leave. Some of my past experiences made me somewhat cautious of putting myself in a very stressful environment. The new company however was not stressful by a long shot.  I liked the environment. 

I settled into my product management role. In this company unlike many other companies PMs can be very technical. My organization gave me more flexibility to be even more technical than most other PMs and get even more involved with engineering (but not coding or architecture) than most others. I was the PM for some of the toughest areas in our organization like scheduling, upgrade, Disaster recovery, security, HA, migration, devops, etc - things no other PM wanted to touch. I also started as one of the PMs for the workhorse software platforms but over time became one of the last remaining ones. Towards the end the clarion call was to work on the next gen product, but I was content to hold down the fort on the older products as the company charged ahead on the new one. Lots of loyal customers using those products.  I was also very close to retirement which was a factor. I was always happy to share any of my brain outputs to whoever could benefit. My crowning achievement during that end period is inventing and creating the documentation to migrate the customers on the older products to the cloud and into the future, and upgrade once in the cloud - an effort with big business value.

I found my Nitch in the PM world!! A company will keep you as long as you are valuable!! Valuable means weighing cost versus short- and long-term benefit. Also, how you are perceived affects decision makers. An individual contributor will never know what goes into the black box from which the short straw is drawn. If a decision is made to cut you, there is not much you can do. However, if you are smart, you will always have a plan B in your hip pocket just in case. I made myself valuable the best I could. I had no talent in management, marketing, business or sales, but I found my Nitch in product management that was of good value. I was happy and was EXACTLY where I wanted to be. I had supportive management. My major technical accomplishments were in the past. Now my focus was to be as useful to my company as I could be and was willing to be. I had no interest in power or fame or even greater wealth (although I like sharing my thinking on some things - example this blog). My motivating driving factors always were a moderately comfortable retirement, my legacy, and striving for professional excellence and integrity in whatever role I played. I enjoyed my stint at that company.

That was the last decade of my career. I retired in 2018 (after a layoff) and am now living quietly and am very relaxed. I have no care in the world and no ax to grind. I look back with satisfaction on my career. A tally of 55 patents (based on a basic patent search) where I am an author or coauthor leaves a warm feeling (some though are resubmitted patents by patent attorney with mods but that is fine). Two other patents by others use a patent with me as the author as the foundation. I was also a member of the body that crafted the XOPEN/XA standard. These two are my durable technical legacy (products come and go). This last career period essay is my very last one on the subject of career. These blogs should give the reader a glimpse of my professional life and my actions through key periods. But the record also needed to be set straight on some things which are misunderstood. Will not revisit this topic again in this site.