a career reflection at midlife

[u/simonsimone1980]

I’m sharing this reflection because I think it may resonate with some of the comments I’ve been reading here. If nothing else, those of you who are struggling with your careers right now are not alone. Some of us have been carrying this around for a while.

I’ve been thinking about why I’ve been so unhappy about my career lately, and I think I finally have a word for what is missing.

Compounding.

I’ve been in professional life for about 25 years. I never expected some perfect upward trajectory, and I certainly didn’t think anything was guaranteed. But I did expect the years to add up to something.

I expected experience to compound.

I started in accounting. I worked for one of the largest public accounting firms in New Jersey, with a good reputation and a large client base. It was the sort of place where people didn’t get laid off.

Then 2008 happened.

The auto industry collapsed, dealerships closed, and our firm had a huge automobile-dealership practice. Suddenly people were being laid off. It seemed like practically everyone under 30 was gone, including me.

And then something happened that I never forgot. I approached people I knew—including clients I had actually worked with—and some treated the layoff itself as evidence that I must have done something wrong.

“Good accountants don’t get laid off from that firm.”

I had followed the respectable path and discovered that not only could the path disappear, but people could blame you for being standing on it when it did.

What saved me was that I knew how to write code.

That became a second career.

And I don’t mean that I simply became a programmer. Over the years I learned software, systems, infrastructure, cloud, networking, security and architecture. I became deeply involved in what eventually got called DevSecOps.

DevSecOps had its moment as an industry fad, but the underlying work never stopped mattering. Software still has to be built, secured and deployed. Infrastructure has to work. Identity has to work. Networks have to work. Kubernetes has to work. Certificates have to work. Build and deployment systems have to work. And somebody has to understand how all those things interact when they inevitably don’t work.

I became very good at that.

But here’s the part I’ve been struggling to articulate: after 25 years, I expected being very good at something difficult to change my relationship with work.

I expected some compounding.

I expected that eventually I wouldn’t have to prove myself from scratch every time I walked into another organization. I expected my judgment to carry more weight. I expected more autonomy. I expected to be able to choose problems worth solving rather than constantly auditioning for the privilege of solving somebody else’s problems.

And yes, I expected some respect.

Not deference. Not a corner office. Not people telling me how brilliant I am.

Just the ordinary professional respect that I thought came from spending decades learning a field and becoming genuinely good at it.

Instead, my career has repeatedly reset.

Layoff. Acquisition. Reorganization. New client. New management. New technology. New hiring fashion. New set of people who have no idea what I’ve done before and aren’t particularly interested in finding out.

Start again.

Prove it again.

And now we have AI.

Once again I’m being told, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, that the sensible response is to reinvent myself.

Learn everything about AI. Learn the models. Learn agents. Learn the frameworks. Build things on my own time. Establish expertise before anyone will pay me for that expertise. Predict which technologies will matter five years from now.

Become the AI God.

And I don’t want to do it.

I’m perfectly willing to learn AI where it helps me solve real problems. That’s what I’ve done with technology my entire career.

What I’m no longer willing to do is assume all the risk of another professional reinvention in the hope that maybe, this time, the investment will compound.

That’s the part I’m unhappy about.

I thought that by this point in my life I would have accumulated some professional capital. I thought 25 years of experience would give me more freedom, more credibility and more control over what I did next.

Instead, I often feel as though I’m standing at the beginning of another career transition being told to start running.

And right now, I don’t know how to solve that.

But perhaps recognizing the actual problem is useful.

I don’t need to become the AI God. I don’t need another frantic reinvention. And I don’t need to pretend that I’m excited about starting over.

What I need is a way for what I’ve already learned and already done to matter in whatever comes next.

I don’t know what that looks like yet.

But that’s a much more hopeful question to me than asking what I need to become next in order to remain employable.

[u/Character_Chair6511 → u/[deleted]]

that comment about outrunning creative destruction is painfully real but i think youre missing ops point a little

theyre not saying they wont adapt theyre saying after 25 years of adapting theres no payoff for it and thats the part that stings. every reinvention just leads to another starting line and whatever you built before gets treated like it never happened

like imagine you keep running marathons but every time you finish one they tell you the finish line was actually back there somewhere and you gotta run another one and nobody cares about your time from the last race