Watt's Up Musings of an original geek

Over your career you will have many individual jobs. When you change jobs I think of this as “work reincarnation” where you “die”, that is, you leave a job and come back into another “existence” or job. Sometime you stick with some of the same people, other times you’re on your own. Sometimes you reuse your expertise, other times you have much to learn. I call the latter “going naked” into a new job. I have been fortunate that these changes have occurred within the same company. As a result my benefits and salary have remained the same, whereas when one changes companies there can be a discontinuity (IMHO, many times this can be a jump down, yet it can be a jump up if you are a player – I’m not). In each of these jobs you meet new people, learn and try new things, and sometimes you can even change locations. I have found that earlier in my career I would stay in a job approximately five years. Now my job duration tends to be about two years. I’ve worked for many different people from a beginning manager, to a bureaucrat, to a corporate high-level technologist called an IBM Fellow. Most times I have choosen to change jobs, but sometimes, much less often, it has been forced upon me. In each of these self-imposed changes I have tried to choose what is the next “thing”, this I call “catching a wave”, that is, something that is new and has a long term and wide impact on the business. This enhances one’s resume and allows you to continue to be gainfully employed.