The Exception: Fifteen Years and Four Jobs at IBM Later

I was fortunate enough to have breakfast with an IBM executive last week, and while he and I were talking about our careers and career progression, he mentioned that he had recently written a blog post about his 20 years at IBM. That, in turn, ultimately inspired me to write this, given my recent 15 year anniversary (and a bit of time on an airplane.)

If you would have asked me when I graduated college fifteen years ago whether or not I’d still be working at IBM, I would have said that I have no idea. On one hand, my dad (and grandpa for that matter) always worked at the same company, so that part wasn’t unusual. However, coming out of college in 2003 meant that times in tech were very turbulent. For that matter, had I started to work somewhere else, many of the tech companies around then are no longer around now. If you were a Vegas odds maker, the odds would have certainly been against still being at IBM.

I fully realize that staying at the same company for this long is by far no longer the norm these days. Nearly all of my other close friends from college have changed companies several times, with the biggest job hopper likely being at more than ten different companies. By age, I’m at the edge of the millennial designation, but I’ve always been more closely aligned to the older generation when it comes to decision making and approach to responsibilities.

So all of this begs the big question: Why have I stayed at IBM for Fifteen Years?

Understandably, there are many aspects to the many decisions that have kept me there, but I’ll highlight three major reasons.

1) IBM has been great to me

I came into IBM as a college hire onto a team where I was given a great opportunity to make a big impact on the business. I’ve always strived to be a top performer, and that hard work has usually been recognized. I’ve been blessed to have great mentors, managers, and executives supporting my career progression. That led to four promotions during the first twelve years of my career, and I am cautiously optimistic that I will be able to make the leap into the executive ranks in the next couple of years.

That’s not to say that there haven’t been tough times, long days, or challenges during my time here, but I know those challenges exist outside the Blue walls as well. I’ve always worked on interesting projects with great clients and have been rewarded for that hard work.

2) While my employer has had the same name, my job has not

There are certainly both pluses and minuses about working at a big company. I’m a positive sort of person, so I’ll stick to the biggest positive in my eyes: the ability to have different careers in the same company. I started off in a post-sales support/SWAT-type role where I was able to visit many Fortune 100 companies and help solve some of the biggest technical challenges they were facing. I always used to joke that I knew far more customers than IBMers, but those were great experiences to garner during the start of my career. I also was able to travel the world and get a wealth of international experience along the way.

But never knowing where you are going to sleep at night gets old, so I decided to take all of the experiences and lessons I learned in the field to empower others. I knew that I could scale my ability to make an impact by empowering a multitude of others, so I moved into an enablement role. While there, I learned even more about enterprise architecture and used that to improve the way we went about training our resources.

Then an opportunity I couldn’t refuse manifested itself, and I made the jump to a worldwide technical sales leadership role. I learned far more than I could have imagined about the sales process and how the front-end side of the business worked. Of course, I brought with me an abundance of knowledge about how customers actually use the software they buy, which was tremendously helpful. It was also great to see customers again!

This year, I’ve taken that enterprise architect role and picked up responsibilities to lead and manage an infrastructure team that now supports both tech sales and external audiences. It’s also in a fast-moving area of the business where we’re investing, which leads me to believe that, I again, am in the right place at the right time in the right role.

In many respects, these have been four (or more) completely different jobs, but with my network within IBM and the variety of opportunities, I was able to tackle them all without switching companies.

3) Work life balance

I know there are many jobs that pay more that I what I make, but I’ve come to understand that there’s more to life than money. The flexibility to balance both work and family life is nearly impossible to put a price on.

I’m a fully mobile-enabled employee; I can do most of my core responsibilities from my phone, iPad, or even on an airplane (provided there’s WiFi). While that sometimes means I answer some emails, calls, or Slack messages after standard business hours, that also means that if I have something personal that I need to take care of during the day, I feel confident that I’m able to do so without reprocussions.

The biggest aspect of the work life balance for me has to be working from home a few days a week — in particular in the morning. Mornings are my time to spend with the kids, and for the last five years, we spend a couple quality hours together running, playing, or whatever that morning brings before I go to work. There’s no way I could do that if I needed to sit in traffic and drive to the office every morning.

I’m empowered to both do what I need to do to be highly successful at work, and still enjoy the precious time I have with my family. This wasn’t historically the biggest reason that I’ve stayed, but it may be now with kids.

So the next logical question is, “What do the next 15 years have in store?” I’d likely fall back to the same answer I gave that long ago in college, that I really don’t know. What I do know is that if I’m able to repeat the success and satisfaction of the previous fifteen, that I’ll be a very happy (albeit a bit older) man. IBM has certainly been good to me, and I hope that our symbiotic relationship does continue for the next 15 years as well.

I’d love to hear why you’ve stayed or left your company. Let me know in the comments or @TalkToErik.

How Did This Five Year Chapter End?

People always say that time goes by faster as you get older, and I’ve certainly come to understand that it’s true. The best reason I’ve heard for that fact is that as you get older, the same amount of time represents an increasingly smaller amount of your overall life. For Crosby, a year is about 20 percent of his life. For Carlyn, that same year is almost a third of it. For me, it’s hard to believe that it’s now less that 3 percent of my life. All I can say is I hope like it doesn’t feel like it gets any faster, because it’s already crazy how fast it goes.

I don’t know about you, but I think about this from time to time, but sometimes there are major milestones that really drive the point home. This past Thursday and Friday were one of those that fit the bill.

Just over five years ago, I found that I suddenly began to gain a little weight and that I was not staying in as good of shape as I would have liked. Not so coincidentally that was also the time Crosby was born. It’s a amazing what a lack of sleep and exercise can do. Needless to say, that’s not what I wanted to write about here. The reason I bring that up is that I started doing something back then that did trigger the reason for writing this blog. I started running.

It’s not that I never ran before, but I certainly never loved running. However, back then I found a magical triple power that running with a jogging stroller provided:

1) I could get some exercise

2) Crosby could get some fresh air

3) Korey could get some peace and quiet.

It really was magical!

Over the past five years, I’ve probably pushed him several thousand miles in our various strollers — which is pretty amazing when I really start to think about it.

The way our work schedules typically line up, I have the kids in the morning. This is our time, and for Crosby and I it always has been. Korey went to work, and he and I ate breakfast, played, went to the park, and eventually I would run him over to day care. That’s been the routine ever since Korey went back to work.

That’s a really long intro for me to say, I really am a little sad to think that that chapter in our lives has come to an end. I really have loved that time that we spent together each day, and ensuring that we got it was always a priority for me. I don’t schedule calls then whenever possible, so that we do get that time. But kids do grow up. The little boy that used to giggle in the baby swings has become a full-on kid.

I must say though it has been a blast. As I look back, we’ve had all sorts of fun over the years. We’ve played “The Sock Game” — where the kids steal my socks and we chase each other around the house and in and out of the bouncy castle. We’ve played “The Tabby Game” —  where we present that Tabby is going to get us under the covers, and we looked down under the bed to find her. We’ve played hide and seek, and danced to music like the Party Freeze Dance. We’ve also done some things outside our house too from playing with chalk, swinging on the web swing, or even Crosby’s creative version of capture the flag with an assortment of gloves.

But of all of the things that we did over those five years, nothing could ever come close to the park — or more accurately a slew of parks. The regular park, the tunnel park, the Aunt Mo park, the green park, the blue park, the YMCA park, the school park, the other school park, the spiderweb park, the new park… we went to them all!

And of course, there were games to play while we were there. The king of all games of late has been the 100 minute game. At some point, I told Crosby that we had a certain amount of time left… say “5 more minutes,” and he said “No, 100 minutes.” And so it began! We “rang the bell” by crossing the bridge at the regular park. We played tag, “The Shoe Game,” and of course everyone’s long time favorite, kick daddy while swinging on the swing. That’s one has made the kids laugh since they were old enough to do so. I slide down into rocks, and create log jams, and play tic-tac-toe. We’ve spent the equivalent of days or weeks there playing.

So getting back to the present, how did the story end? As you may have imagined, the short version is that it ended exactly how it started.  Wednesday was the last regular day that I’ll have them both in the morning. Last Friday, ended truly exactly how it started — with me running and Crosby riding in the stroller on the Friday. Now I’m sure we’ll still run on the weekends and maybe again in the summer, but it is really a bit of an end of an era.

So I just soaked it in one last time. That Friday we went to the school park since the kids were still out for summer. We started with a game of tag and chasing one another. Somehow my using Turbo-mode to get away caused him to trip and fall from behind, so that brought a quick end to that game. Fortunately, I was able to redirect the sorrow into a trip over to the swings.

As we were swinging side by side, it really became one of those moments in time where you wish you could just hit pause to be able to come back to it. As a side note, it reminds me of something that the father and son would do in About Time. I’ll do the best I can to remember that moment and writing about it here will certainly help.

We couldn’t swing on the swings without playing the “Who’s little boy game?” I think today’s response was “Daddy’s little toot toot boy!”

Unfortunately, like all mornings, the time at the park needed to come to an end, but we did manage to play a quick round of one hundred minutes before we took off.

I know there will always be new and fun things to do as both kids continue to grow, but this will no doubt be something I will always cherish. And on the bright side, while I’ll certainly miss Crosby in the mornings, that will mean that Carlyn and I get to start spending some additional quality one-on-one time together which will be very welcomed.

Sunday Sunday Funday at the Roller Rink and More

If you haven’t figured it out by now, we’re not the sort of family that likes to just sit at home and watch TV all day. This Sunday was no exception. I started off the day with a 7 mile run with Wes to get things going. Crosby opted to come with today, which I never complain about. We did the normal long loop run down the trail and around Brushy Creek Lake, and then wrapped up the trip with a stop at the “School Park.”

He and I probably played there for nearly 45 minutes before my stomach told me it was time to get going home. He wanted to run a bit, and so when he got home it was too hot, so he had take off his shirt too to be like daddy to cool off.

I grabbed a quick bowl of cereal and then went outside to try to finish up my rock project (which probably deserves it’s own post). I got about a third of the way down the path of setting the stepping stones before Crosby and Korey came out to tell me it was time to wash up. Korey found out that the roller rink opens early on Sunday’s for free public skating lessons, so we really hustled to make it down there in time. We had a buy one get one entry, so it only ended up being $16 for the four of us (including skate rental).

Looking back, doing the lessons were key. Korey and I even picked up a few tricks on the right way to get up and how to use the pizza shape to keep yourself from rolling. The lessons were also a big deal because neither of the kids had ever been skating before. Carlyn had some of the little plastic over the shoe style skates, but Crosby had the real deal.

Carlyn started picking it up like a champ. It definitely took her a bit to get her balance, but after a few falls, she was cruising down the rink on her own, marching, turning, and stopping.

Crosby was having a bit more issues, but in his defense, the real skates were much more slippery than the plastic ones. He was really struggling to keep his balance (even holding onto me), so we eventually gave it a try on the carpet. That drastically improved things and he was doing better over there. However, whenever we went back on the real floor, he was still struggling and getting very frustrated. He was about to give up and even started to cry a bit.

I saw that enough was enough, so we went over and tried the plastic skates this time with far better results. With those, he was out there in a hurry and able to get around all on his own. You could also just see his confidence growing as he was able to stay on his feet for more that 10 seconds at a time. We even got back out to the middle in time to do the hokie pokie with the rest of the lesson group.

Shortly after that, the roller rink actually opened and a few more people came in, but not so many that you couldn’t still get around. By this time, the kids were really into it and having a blast going around. I won’t lie in that I was having a lot of fun too!

If there was one thing we didn’t plan out well, it was food. Both kids started getting really hungry, but fortunately, some funions came to the rescue and we were able to stay for almost another hour. Korey and I would take turns with each of them, but still were able to make a few quicker laps on our own. Skating was definitely a hit, and I’m sure will do it again before too long.

Since we were in the area, and the grownups were getting hungry too, we went next door to Big Daddy’s and got some monster burgers for lunch (BOGO of course 🙂 ). I had a massive chili cheeseburger and Korey had something with fried peppers, queso, and ghost pepper aioli. As always, the food was really good!

By the time lunched wrapped up, the kids were getting restless, so we hurried up to go back home. Carlyn almost immediately fell asleep, and Crosby was only a few minutes behind her. Apparently all that skating really wore them out!

I ran a few errands, and then was going to keg the Hard Cider, but as we were pulling into Kyle and Melissa’s driveway, Kyle comes out to tell me that the autosiphon cracked as he was trying to get it cleaned up for me. At least there were some good intentions there! It was also pretty old, so there’s no doubt that I got my money’s worth.

On the plus side of things, that meant that we could just hang out a bit, so the kids and I watched some baseball with Kyle, while Korey and Melissa did driveway happy hour with the neighbors across the street. It was nice to just relax and drink a few beers with friends.

Last but not least on a full Sunday, we decided to go to Tokyo Steakhouse for my birthday meal there. The kids usually just share some edamame, but Korey and I each got to enjoy some hibachi chicken and steak. It’s always fun to see the show — even if it is the same thing every time. The food is also always really good!

To add to the entertainment, we had a family next to us whose son just turned 21. There were doing sake bombs, and having a good old time. They were really nice and also shared a good laugh when the wait staff mixed up and included a wrong name for him.

It was a really busy day, but it was also a really fun one! I’m so thankful that my family is able to enjoy days just like that.