In part one I covered my work history from a sixteen year old through my first post-college professional job plus two side gigs, plus getting my masters degree. In this post I will bring the history up to date and will talk about lessons learned.
One of the goals I read about for people thinking about retirement is travel. As we will see in this post, my wife and I have traveled a reasonable amount, much of it in conjunction with work.
My first job started as a full-time internship at a government agency. This internship taught me computer skills. I became professionalized, which required coursework, passing a difficult exam and writing a professional paper. I graduated three months early and earned two promotions, coming out of the program as a grade 11. The program only guaranteed one promotion and only gave top graduates the second promotion.
You would think then that I would get a great assignment. Think again. I did get a trip to the Boston area to study a specific programming language. In January 1983 my wife and I took a trip to Florida to see my grandmother, her aunt and Disney-world. We also saw the Kennedy Space Center, St. Augustine and other sites. It was a great road trip.
I returned to the office to find that the project I was on had been cancelled and I had been re-assigned to another project, with no say in the matter. The office they assigned me to was working on some very old computers. They wanted me to learn the new technology for the replacement system. They sent me for three weeks training driving daily to somewhere in Virginia. It was an arduous drive that exhausted me. I remember pulling over to the side of the road and sleeping one afternoon on the way home.
A government job may be more secure than a private sector job, but that does not mean the work will be useful or interesting. I was upset at the loss of control of my career and decided to take my power back. I began interviewing for a new job.
In May of 1983 I landed a job at with a federal contractor. My salary went up from $25,500 to $30, 000 (not sure why I remember these numbers but they are burned in my brain). I had to wait a few weeks for my clearance to transfer so I brought my new Commodore 64 into work and taught myself about 8 bit personal computers (and Zork).
They sent me back to the same place I had been working, but with a different customer. I was given creative work to do, learning about a new and upcoming technology called relational databases (different things excite different folks, what can I say).
For the next 12 years or so I had a variety of challenging and interesting assignments. Even though I was no longer a government employee, my customer got the dollars back they had invested in me during my intern program. I was able to do more as a contractor than as an employee.
I also had fun and piggybacked business travel with pleasure. A couple of years into my first assignment I was sent to a conference at the Disneyland Hotel in California. These conferences I came to learn set aside one night for ‘customer appreciation’ (can you say party?) . This one included a conference only admission to Disneyland (for one section of the park). My wife flew out to California at the end of this conference and we did Disneyland (the whole park) together. We also toured a studio, saw a taping of the $20,000 pyramid and I tried out (but did not do well enough on the test for further consideration) for Jeopardy! My airfare was paid for by the company, so we only had to pay for travel for my wife. Call this business travel hacking.
In 1988 I was on another project that required travel. They sent me to Hawaii for 19 days (I liked to joke that nobody said that fighting communism was easy, but someone had to do it). Most of my work time was spent deep underground and because Hawaii is so far south, sunset is always around 6 PM, give or take about 30 minutes. When I returned my VP joked that I was the only person who spent 3 weeks in Hawaii and did not come back with a tan. Note that I am sun-phobic so this was somewhat on purpose. I did tour Oahu extensively though, finding time on weekends to explore the island.
Towards the end of the trip my wife flew out and we spent time together on the island. I took her to some of the places I had found. On the way home, we stopped in San Francisco. This was my first trip there and it was not a good one, at least when dealing with the customer service folks in hotels and restaurants. I don’t know if it was because SF is not Hawaii, because I had not been home in over 3 weeks, or if it was something else, but I found all these customer facing folks to be very rude.
We did have some good experiences there though. My wife was navigating while I drove a rental. She tells me to turn left. Next thing you know, I am executing a series of hairpin turns and laughing my ass off. I had never heard of Lombard Street before. Great memory. We also toured the cable car museum and saw the cable car turn-around at the end of the line.
When traveling for government work you got the government rates for hotels and a government per diem. If you managed your meals well, you could come out ahead on this deal. I was learning the art of travel hacking early.
The 1983 project I was on grew to a larger number of people and became unwieldy. As a founding father of the project I was trying to rescue it, to no avail. All I got for my trouble was an ulcer. My lesson learned: a small team of sharp people can get great things done; a large team of average people cannot get anything done. I became determined to stick to small teams going forward. Sadly, this project never did achieve its mission.
Around 1984 or 1985 my wife and I took a week long trip to London – this one was paid for 100% out of our pockets. We did take a charter flight and it was a package deal and the exchange rate was favorable, so we did OK. It was a great trip.
The 1988 project I was working consisted of a couple of other members from my company and a couple of government employees. We were assigned to deploy a system to a number of locations beyond Hawaii. I spent a four weeks in Germany, including two weeks in Berlin. Toured a lot on the weekends, including a day in Austria. My wife did not come on this trip. It was the longest time we have ever spent apart and I still remember missing her.
This paragraph is not to be taken seriously – I spent two weeks in Berlin in 1988. In 1989 the Berlin wall fell and by 1990 the USSR fell as well. Mission complete. Or post hoc ergo proctor hoc.
I also returned to England that year. We were in the middle of the country. On the weekend we drove up to Edinburgh and toured the castle. We also saw Hadrian’s wall. We in this case was my partner on the project.
Working on another assignment for the same customer in 1992 I was asked to return to England. I had a friend from high school who was on assignment in Edinburgh. After college he had moved to the Spokane area and I had moved to the East Coast so it was difficult to see each other. I booked a trip for my wife and I to see my friend and his wife in Edinburgh a week ahead of my assignment. Work paid for the majority of my travel. My daughter was born in 1991. She was six months old when we took this trip. After a great visit, I had to put my wife and daughter on a plane by themselves back home across the pond. Then I did my work assignment.
Somewhere along the way I think I went back one more time. I have two distinct memories. I was exiting one site onto a country road. There was no traffic. I fell into my normal habit and was in the right lane until an oncoming lorry honked his horn. Oops. The other memory was that I had to visit several sites and I traveled the Motorways (Designated M1, M2, etc, like our interstate system). Somewhere along the way I think I passed Stonehenge but was never certain.
During this period I had one last longer travel assignment, this one to Colorado. I remember calling my wife when she was bathing my daughter. Until this time she liked my traveling, as it gave her some alone time that she cherished. This particular conversation was different. Apparently the bathing was not going well. The sentence I remember was ‘This is no fun anymore.’ That was my last longer travel assignment. I would occasionally go for training or to a conference but always kept future trips to a week or less.
I think I need to write a separate post about my real estate adventures, so I will just skip to the part where we found a piece of property and built a house in 1994, moving in a week before Thanksgiving. My son was born about six weeks earlier. I also took an evening class that summer in C++ programming. So in 1994 we launched and completed the construction of a new house, had our second kid, while I was taking a college level class – and by the end of the year I kind of lost my job. Way too many irons in the fire.
My last work assignment with this customer was in a section I did not want to be in, on a technology I was not interested in, with a customer manager I did not like. With all the other stuff going on. Let’s just say we did not get along. She told me to find another position by the end of the year and then told everyone I interviewed with that they should not take me on. Yikes.
By 1994 I had received a number of promotions and was in a more senior position. There are not as many of these positions available on these contracts. Fortunately I found another customer. I did not lose my job in a technical sense in that I stayed with my company. But instead of driving 10 miles each way to work, I had to travel about 22 miles through some very rough roads and dense traffic. Still, it paid off well. My new boss and I got along very well and I was sent for training to become an Oracle Database Administrator (DBA). I loved it. That assignment only lasted eight months and was the last time I worked on a government contract, but it changed the direction of my life.
Post Government Work
In my next assignment, I left the government world, as it turned out for good. I was sent to an insurance company to help on an Oracle project as a DBA. I saw that the commercial world was a better place to work than the government world. Still, contracting was an issue in that one always had to worry about the next assignment when the current contract ended. Having two kids and a real house with a real mortgage now (previous mortgage was much less as the townhouse we lived in was worth much less), I needed some stability. So when the company I was contracting with offered me a permanent position, I jumped at it. I liked these folks and looked forward to a nice career with them.
Listen up please, especially those of you who think you do not need an emergency fund, that you can put every spare penny in the market, nothing is for certain. Six weeks after I took this job, the company I had joined was sold to another company based out of Chicago. I traveled to Chicago to meet the new owners and they came down here. No matter how hard I tried, I did not like these new owners or share their vision for the future.
In the meantime something more serious happened. In the summer of 1995 we learned that my wife had a stage 3 cancer. Over the next year she had chemo, surgery, a near lethal dose of chemo followed by an autologous stem cell transplant, and then radiation. She is a very determined person and no one else was going to raise her kids so she beat this cancer into oblivion. Obviously she could not work during this time. While we had incredible help from family, I had an extra burden of childcare in addition to my work duties and taking care of her.
But the lawn still had to be mowed and the bills still had to be paid. Fortunately, we had taken a private disability policy on my wife, who was self-employed. Still, paying the bills was challenging. Somehow we got through this. Her treatment was finished by August of 1996. I left my gig as a contractor in early November 1996 and the sale of the company I had just joined was announced in mid-December 1996. By April of 1997 I was miserable, feeling trapped and vulnerable. Would the new company even keep me on? I began interviewing. In May I was at a conference on the west coast I think when I got news of a favorable job prospect.
The place I had been working was about 22 miles away (about the same distance as my assignment in DC, but in a different, more travel friendly direction). The new company I was to interview with was about a mile away from my house. I interviewed with them several times in June and July and started in early August. I technically took a small pay cut, but the cost of commuting was about to go way down, they offered a sign-on bonus which more than covered the difference, the job had a built-in bonus structure and stock options.
Welcome to the late 90’s. Turns out, lots of tech companies were structuring deals like this. In addition to the quarterly bonuses, they were giving bonuses at project completions. I could (and did quite often) go home for lunch. They also bought lunch for us quite often (and sometimes dinner). Within a month of joining our team was invited to go on a catered harbor cruise. The CFO and CEO were on the ship. Vendors were bringing us shirts and the company was buying shirts with project logos. I had never worked for a company like this before.
While I have remained at this company for 20 years now, this picture was not always so rosy. The company was fast growing, but their were times when we grew backwards too. When I joined I was about the 700th person hired, so given some turnover there were about 600 employees. We grew with some fits and starts to about 2000 employees. Then the dot-com bust occurred around 2001. We shrunk back to about 1200 employees. I had to lay off some of my staff. Not my favorite day at work.
Along the way we acquired a lot of other companies and for the most part integrated them into our culture. However, these were all smaller companies. About 8 years ago we acquired a division of another company that was 50% or so larger than us in terms of employees and would provide something like 2/3 of our revenue. I traveled to Ottawa, Canada to help with this acquisition.
The Ottawa airport is a bit provincial and it is common for flights to be cancelled. Already a couple of days late, I was running out of clothes, medicine, and patience. I rented a van and drove home – it took about 10 hours. There I went taking control again.
As the process unfolded it was our company that had to accommodate the company we acquired. We wondered who bought whom. Still, the people I have worked with from Canada have been quite talented.
There have been bumps and conflicts along the way. I disagreed with some of my managers and found myself in another department with new challenges. I had the support of other management though and thrived in the new assignment. That sent me on trips to Massachusetts, Georgia, and New Jersey. I have also been taken golfing at Half-Moon Bay in California (I did not really appreciate the significance of this at the time). I traveled to Dallas, Denver, Florida, North Carolina and California for conferences and training, and back to California for a number of business trips.
The managers I disagreed with left the company (not necessarily of their own volition) and I returned to my old job with an additional assignment. That led me to a set of trips to Guadalajara Mexico, Northern Ireland, and Memphis Tennessee, among other places. I grew my team, which has become international.
While I may never reach the most senior echelons of management, because my style is a bit too candid and forceful for some, I have had the ear of senior management and the ability to influence the direction of my team and our technology. One of the reasons people do not like corporate work is that they do not feel listened to. I have have had the opposite experience. I was given the opportunity to solve problems that made working easier for others and I took pride in that. I have also tried to ensure that my team is listened to as well.
Not everything goes my way and not every day is fun, but I have been well rewarded financially and have felt like my contributions have meant something. Today I take pride in growing my team’s skills and preparing them to take over.
So I have had opportunities to learn many new skills, accumulate some wealth, and help people by solving their problems. I hear people talk about wanting to travel when they reach FI. I have already had the opportunity to travel to many places. There are a few others I might hit in retirement, but that is not what will make the decision as to when to retire.
Here is the main point of this whole odyssey: a rubber band is only useful when it is being stretched. We need to continue to be challenged. That is probably the second thing holding me back from retiring. The first is the challenge of medical bills. My wife recovered from her cancer but is facing other challenges these days that require expensive medication. I am working on a solution, but as they say in India, this may take some time.
I think I would like to help others reach their FI goals. When I can best figure out how to do this (probably earning some money at it as well) and when I have solved the medical bill challenge, I will be ready to take on the next adventure.