The goodbye had to be an email.
My last day at Reality Check had been the previous Friday. Then the weekend went sideways and ended early. Whatever proper farewell I imagined never happened.
So I wrote to the team a few days later.
I had accepted the Director of Systems Operations job at Shutterstock. Reality Check and I had discussed ways I might continue helping, but the events around that final weekend killed the possibility.
Eight months is not a long tenure. It was long enough to care about the people.
It was also long enough to leave behind work that would become somebody else's problem. That bothered me. Infrastructure rewards continuity, and this departure had very little of it.
The team had taken me in as CTO, tolerated my questions, and worked through a lot of change. We built and fixed things together. We traveled. We tried to make a complicated business better while leadership and expectations kept shifting around us.
I called them “all Aces.” I meant it.
Leaving a company is rarely the clean break a résumé makes it look like. A line ends in one month and starts in another. The actual experience is unfinished conversations, people you owe a drink, systems you still think about, and a strange feeling when the work continues without you.
I could be certain that leaving was right and still feel lousy about the way it ended. Both things were true.
The job had not become what I hoped. That did not make the relationships disposable.
I wanted everybody to know that before I moved on.