Just Beat the Countdown
I had a job interview this morning, New Year’s Eve, and accepted this afternoon. If you're a friend, you'll forward this HR-eyebrow-raising blog along with a couple of nudies from my 20s to my new employer. If you're a true friend, this will be done quicker because the nudies are saved in your Favorites. Given the amount of work I put into my body, I would be offended if it didn't occupy at least one filled-in heart icon on your iPhone.
It’s a career change from business development to Salesforce administration, roughly speaking sales to IT. Back in 2008, I left sportswriting for startups. Basically anytime a massive recession challenges all that we know in America, I feel it’s the right headwind to spread my wings.
There is a lot to unpack here. The new salary is less than half of the old one. Although to be fair, I was unemployed. Glass half full, this is technically a raise of infinity percent.
I spent an unhealthy amount of time on LinkedIn in 2020. It is the best tool for career discovery, connections and jobs. This stimulating opportunity to completely own a Salesforce instance — and play admin, consultant, architect, developer — seemed to happen by chance when I caught the listing on LinkedIn 38 minutes after it was posted. In reality, I was simply checking at short intervals because the platform offers so much value.
But it’s still social media, and an even more crafted one at that. Scroll too deep on LinkedIn, and your model of America's workforce falls into a twilight zone where everyone is so proud and humbled to be named to the regional 27 Under 27 list.
Social media feeds always will skew toward what is notable. In this year of record economic upheaval, seemingly every other LinkedIn post was an announcement of losing or getting a job. Neither makes you feel particularly good when unemployed yourself.
What has been nice to hear as a 36-year-old with a 1-year-old perusing entry-level positions... are other stories of nonlinear paths. My old roommate has some big balls, which I literally saw so many times during our spectacular year living together they still make cameos in my bittersweet dreams.
He’s walking away from trillion-dollar Microsoft (which owns LinkedIn) and its zero-cost health insurance for his family of four and moving out of their house in Philly to build the largest vacation rental company in Jersey Shore.
In the big ovaries category, my cousin went to Harvard Law — and Macedonia this year to teach English. My old coworker just quit her job at a tech unicorn whose stock price has looked like Covid graphs. She enters the raging tail end of the pandemic with no plan.
I hope she doesn’t mind my linking to the first post of her newsletter, which is just gold. It’s like Tony Romo's goodbye press conference times 1,000. It also links to some deep and useful thought around work fulfillment.
Like I said, there’s a lot to unpack. Read those fantastic articles. I’d like to write more about this, but only two hours remain in December to finish my monthly post and I want to start a long countdown to the end of the longest year with the best part of my year (wife).
I haven’t written on this tight of a deadline since covering high school football games in ’08. Then and now. I am proud and humbled for the opportunity of 2021.