The Beginning and End of a Career

After college my jobs began to only strengthen that I didn’t belong. Again when I was done with my job, I ran. When I had a break in the work day, the last thing I wanted to do was talk about tech or the engineering field. I found myself alone with a book for lunch everyday. I tried to go to lunch with everyone, but I had nothing to add to the conversations and they had no interest in the subjects I brought up.

I had an unfortunate nasty first boss, but good co-workers. I was laid off after 18 months on the job. On my birthday actually. My second job was almost just an extension of the first. After I was laid off, it seemed to set off a domino effect. 80% of everyone I worked with left. Half of them started their own company, and I was employee #9. We started off working out of Rockwell, then moved to our own building with its own fab and lab that we built from scratch. There were two test engineers, me and someone much more qualified (finishing his PhD from Berkeley). That meant I would be doing a little more grunt work. I learned to drive a fork lift, and actually drove our first piece of test equipment off the truck and into our lab. Sooo much fun. If you ever get the opportunity I highly recommend working for a start up. But like most companies working of VC in 2001, we were shut down that fall.

The third and (so far) final job took 6 months to find. It moved us back to Santa Clara. It was a good job. Again I found myself spending most lunches alone. After working there a little over a year, Toby and I decided to start trying for children. At the 18 month mark, I was pregnant. If I didn’t stick out before, try running a meeting for 18 men when you are the only woman 8 months pregnant. I had to stand at a funny angle so my belly wouldn’t block the projector. After working there for 2 and a half years I became a working mother. I tried working from home half the week, and in the office the other half. I stuck with breast feeding, finding pumping at work how I would spend most of my breaks. After 8 months of it, they told me they wanted me back in the office full time, and wanted to promote me to head a project. Decision time.

I knew taking this on meant 60 hour weeks, full time day care or nanny, and stress both at home and work. It was so easy, I think I knew the answer even before I went over the pros and cons list. I was done. I didn’t love this job, most of the time I didn’t even like it. The best I could say about it is “I didn’t hate it”. Did I really want to push myself that hard for something I didn’t hate? No. So I quit. It took one week to make the decision, and 20 minutes on the phone with a friend before going in to tell my boss. They offered financial incentive in the form of paying for day care to get me to stay, but I knew there wasn’t much else they could give me that would make me stay.

When I have a bad week at home; the house was never clean, the kids were out of control, and I spoke to my husband a total of 20 minutes that week, I will often think about that day. But so far nothing has made me truly regret it.

Thus ended my first career....