It was not something I was expecting -- one minute, I was planning on leaving after six months with the company, and the next, I was recruited off the help desk and into an actual career path I hadn't even known existed.
I'm a Business Analyst now, working with the development team of the same company that first took a chance on me last year. My days are filled with requirements and use cases and acceptance criteria, with solving problems and studying and incredibly dry textbooks -- so like what I was doing before I moved into IT, before I changed my life.
It feels very similar, but I have to hope it won't take 150 hours of outside-the-office work to feel capable (like last time).
In transitioning to a new team, I've gained back some of what I thought I'd lost when I left teaching. Suddenly, there is more laughter in my day. I tolerated most of my coworkers, but I genuinely like the developer on my team, who loves musicals and dogs and is just as sarcastic as I am. I like the head of AppDev, who is nerdy and drives a sweet car and loves to talk about anything, like I do. I love my boss, who is enthusiastic and energetic and so positive it's almost overwhelming.
Suddenly, I'm surrounded by people for whom technology is a passion, not just a job. I love it.
And even if I don't love the mission of my company, I was prepared to keep right on going until I hit a year or more of experience. I was prepared to keep learning and practicing and getting better until I was more than qualified to find a new gig at a bigger, more likable company.
Until last Thursday.
Last Thursday, my boss announced she was leaving. June 1st is her last day.
As is easy to imagine, this threw me for a bit of a tailspin.
I genuinely like my boss. She spent months giving me advice and direction for how to improve my skills while I was bored on the help desk. When the opportunity arose for her to create a business analyst position on the dev team, she jumped at it -- and convinced upper management that I was the right person for the job. She has spent countless hours with me doing training, finding resources for me to learn, and giving me feedback to help me grow. She's even funded my membership to two professional organizations, including a local one so I can get involved in my field.
On top of that, she's spent the last two months building our dev team into one worth working on. She's built a great data services team, recruited an App/Dev manager who is an expert in the field, and found some awesome devs to actually do the work. She's protected us from unreasonable requests from leadership, helped us navigate some truly awful deadlines and expectations, and through it all, she's talked up how much amazing work we are doing.
In all, she's an incredible person, and I love working for her.
Now she's leaving.
It shadows my whole future with question marks -- Just how much did she protect us from the mess of senior leadership? What's about to happen with the dev team? With my BA training? Should I leave? Will someone hire me when I only have six months experience in the field? If I don't leave, can I tough it out, or will it send me straight back to the same disastrous mental health issues I'd finally left behind?
There are no easy answers.
As much as I love her, her decision is a little cutthroat too. Our new App/Dev manager joined the firm less than a month ago, wooed away from a long career as a dev and a consultant by my boss. The primary developer on our team took the job on a recommendation from a friend on the data services team, which my boss ran.
And without her intervention and support, I would have been gone months ago. It was never that I loved working for a semi-shady law firm; it was that working with her made it worth it to stay.
We have a built a team here, and suddenly our fearless leader is leaving.
She wants me to go with her. Supposedly, her new company has an open business analyst position, and she wants me to apply. She's talking me up to her recruiter and manager, trying to get them to see what she sees in me. I'm flattered, really -- having someone else so invested in my career is strange to say the least. But I also don't know if it'll happen. Her company is a big one, and big companies don't always like to take chances on young careers. If I'm lucky, they might. If I'm really lucky, all those question marks will dissipate into some very solid, high-dollar exclamation points.
Like she already has, my boss could change my life.
But it's slow going, like everything in corporate America, and instead for the next few weeks, all I can do is learn as much as possible and hope that maybe, just maybe, my new job can be my future one, too.
