Why I left my corporate life



The good old cubicle



            

            In October 2010, I left my good paying job at CH2M HILL and beach house in Newport Beach, packed up my belongings, and moved to a no amenities lifestyle to become a Peace Corps Volunteer in Rwanda.  From my family, friends, and co-workers, I have received a lot of condemnation, confusion, and praise.  Mostly though, I received a varying degree of puzzled looks.  Why would you leave?

            The detractors to this decision look at it from a practical and lifestyle point of view.  I had a good paying job in a bad economy, and a contract that would almost guarantee me work for the next two years.  While many of my friends have been laid off and have no hope of finding work in engineering or other fields, I had consistently been getting work.  Furthermore, I had been getting raises (albeit marginal), but in this economy that is better than wage cuts or no raise at all.  Furthermore, CH2M HILL is a good place to work.  The staff is friendly, helpful, and knowledgeable.  Employees are smart and hard working.  Benefits are good, and I didn’t have to worry about taking time off.  It’s a good place to work if you like to travel such as myself and a great place to work if you have kids and need flexibility. 

            Many of my friends look at my decision from a lifestyle point of view.  I lived in a beach house in Newport, complete with grills, keg-a-raiders, beach, and friends everywhere.  I was able to do a lot of personal travel, and had great weekend trips.  They were upset that I would leave at a great time in life, and I understand.  Trust me, it wasn’t an easy decision, and there are plenty of days here when things go bad and I wonder why I left too. 

            The truth is that I left for a combination of reasons.  I really enjoyed my life but was worried that I was going to be trapped into that lifestyle. It made me scared.  Is this it?  Occasional trips but no real adventures where you discover other things about yourself?  I met a lot of people in Orange County, but none of them were teaching me anything other than the technical aspects of life.  I wanted to learn more, and that education needed to take me out of my realm of where I lived.  There are things that can’t be taught or read, but must be discovered, and I knew that.  The biggest growth periods are those where you become uncomfortable, you have to seek out the answer on your own, where you stretch yourself in multiple directions. 

            I knew I had a good job, and I simply didn’t want to leave to “discover myself.”  So I started to drop hints.  I’d discuss doing management training programs, working on proposals, getting face to face with clients, and formally learning the business aspect of our firm.  Most importantly, I wanted to live abroad and learn from others.  I started to apply and heavily inquire into positions abroad.  One day my boss in Reno said, “How about Afghanistan?”  To which I replied, “Great.”  I didn’t care, I just wanted to learn.  However, these opportunities would come and go with no real push (or in the case of Afghanistan, not materialize for various reasons), and I kept hearing the same words over and over again.  The word would be disguised in different terms, but it always meant the same thing.  It was the “costs.”  The “overhead charge,” the “prohibitive tax structure for working abroad,” the “lack of resources available for this project to give you the contract you want,” it all said one thing to me: we like you but don’t want to invest. 

I felt after a while as if I was being pushed from one job to another, plugging holes in tasks.  Truth be told, I’m great at that.  When your entire career is almost always in a bad economy, you do whatever you have to do.  So that is what I became good at doing, whatever needed to be done.  However, when I was asking to move on to a project/task/training that I wanted, I felt as if it was a dead end and consistent “sorry, no.”  Truth be told, at the end I stopped asking because I knew the answer. 

            To the company’s credit, they liked me and wanted me to stay on at the firm.  During my tenure at CH2M HILL, there were two times when management easily could have laid me off due to a lack of workload.  However, they scraped together and kept me on.  For that I will always be thankful.  Also, during my projects they always gave me the resources needed to accomplish that task.  Management didn’t sit behind me and treat me like a child, they expected work to get done and that is what I did.  If I had to move cities or live in hotels to do it, so be it.  In this way the company and I had a great symbiotic relationship. 

            Basically I wanted to move up or move on.  I didn’t want to sift through more projects only to look back five years from now with a resume of completed project.  Not that it’s a bad thing, but I wanted more.  I wanted it because of an event that happened to me when I was 19:

            I was on a long cross-continental flight to New York with my best friend Darren.  We were going to live on a lake in rural Pennsylvania for the summer as camp counselors and I would double as a tennis instructor.  We were going onto the great unknown, and I was excited.  On the long flight I sat next to a woman who was probably in her late 30s.  She was telling me about some fun trips she had done through Central America and how she learned a lot through those trips.  There were crazy and uncomfortable moments, but she grew from them.  At the end of the recollections, she looked forward blankly ahead and said (I’m paraphrasing), “I haven’t done anything like that since.”  She gave an implied look of she wish she had traveled and discovered more, but she gave this resigned voice like there was no way to go back and fix it.  This was now her life, and that one was over. 

            I didn’t want it to be over.  I didn’t want to leave CH.  However, I didn’t want to sit in between.  So I left, and as I took the elevator down to the parking lot for the last time at my job I thought to myself, “What the hell are you doing?”  I felt like I was disappointing a lot of management that I had grown a kinship to.  I didn’t want to let them down or make them feel betrayed.  I liked my bosses (and in the spirit of keeping things to a general tone, I won’t name them in person) and I hoped that they would understand. 

            Big decisions in life are tough.  However, I don’t feel like this was an irreversible decision and that is what makes it easier to swallow.  I wasn’t an elected official giving up my post or the shortstop for the Yankees.  I can always go back to the beach, and I could go back to engineering.  In the interim I get to do something that encapsulates me, something that I have admired for a very long time, and something that I have wanted to do that I thought might be irreversible if I don’t do it now: be a Peace Corps Volunteer.  I would work for CH2M HILL again for one main reason: I liked the people and the job.  In due time, when there are more difficult decisions to make, maybe I’ll ask to be employed by them again.