The Corporate Cocoon

What I remember most from my first day at this job was hearing, "We'd like Yahoo! to be the last job you ever have."

This was during the Human Resources part of orientation, and she went on to explain, "Whatever you want to do next, you can do it here.  You want to be a sports journalist?  We have that.  You want to be an economist?  We've got several of those.  Want to be the worlds foremost authority on JavaScript?  You can do that here."

5 years later, I was having lunch with a pair of Angel Investors discussing my startup idea ("to write educational games for adult professionals").  Was I ready to leave the corporate cocoon and venture out on my own?  The conversation came around to how well I understood the market I was trying to enter.  Using a kinder Socratic method, they helped me understand that I may be a pretty good customer of adult education, but I have no idea how the market works on the inside.

So, no, I wasn't ready to leave the nest yet.  Now the conversation came back around to what I do inside of Yahoo.  Well, I write software, and that'll help.  And, for an IT guy, I've got a pretty good customer focus.  But was I taking advantage of where I was, to plan out where I want to be?

And they asked, "Yahoo has a pretty big HR department, right?  They probably do professional development courses, ethics training, sexual harassment refreshers? Are there internal trainers that cover all the custom technology Yahoo builds?  What about informal classes, like chalk talks and lunch-and-learns?  Have you met all these people, and volunteered your services, as one concerned employee to another?"

So I've spent the last year both kicking ass at my day job, and keeping my ears open for chances to participate in other projects about teaching challenging skills to smart adults.  And it's true what they say; you make your own luck.  I've met some awesome people who spend some or all of their time making their fellow yahoos smarter, and one of those contacts thought of me when a job opened for a full time Technical Learning Manager in our Service Engineering and Operations division.

It's been weird interviewing for this new job.  My old title was "IT Architect" which has a certain nerdy prestige, and the bulk of my time has been in creating new software.  The one question I got from every single interviewer was, "No really, why do you want this job?  Why leave making new things, just to teach about existing things?"  My answer seems to have worked for people, in part because it turns an age-old interview cliche into a serious answer to an honest question:

My 5-year-plan is to found a company that makes educational games for adult professionals.  Pick professions like high tech, law, and medicine, where people have a constant requirement to learn new things and high disposable income, and give them a better way to learn.  This job lets me combine what I know about technology--especially at Yahoo--with my newly minted Instructional Design and Delivery skills.  It lets me contribute to fixing some of Yahoo's interesting strategic issues, like turnover and morale.  And it lets me spend all day, every day preparing for my next adventure. 

But my next adventure won't be "another job."  Yahoo promised to be the last job I'll ever need.