A letter to anyone who has just left Big Tech

You’ve done well, and you’ve just left Big Tech. Now you’re not sure the next step is yours.

I’m writing this to the person I was when I left. I spent six years at Google, then two at Amazon in a job I wasn’t suited to. I burnt out, left in 2016, and became an independent consultant. Since then I’ve spent ten years working with founders and executives across Europe and the US, doing my own sales and marketing along the way. Getting here took two burnouts, and in the end I left consulting for coaching. It took me far longer than it needed to, and you don’t have to take as long as I did.

So you’ve left, by choice or not: garden leave, a package, or a door you opened yourself. If it wasn’t your choice, you may still be angry about how it ended. Maybe an offer has already come in, and you’re not sure you want it. Or you’ve already started the next big job, and you’re not sure it was the right yes.

There was the first Monday with no calendar, and now you call it “taking some time”. You update your CV for roles you know you don’t want, but you haven’t added the green Open to Work frame to your LinkedIn photo. Without the company ID badge hanging from your hip, you’re finding out who was meeting you, and who was meeting the logo. And under that sits a bigger question: without the job and the title, who are you now?

And there’s the money. It was good money, but not enough to retire on. You check how long your savings will last more often than you’d admit. The friends who left before you say they earn a quarter of what they did and they’re happier, but you’ve done the maths and you’re not sure it works.

Maybe it’s another job. Big Tech again, a startup or a corporate, each with its own trade-offs. And you wonder whether ten years of one company’s way of working will bend to somewhere new.

Maybe there’s something you want to build. It lives in your Notes app, or in a side project you’ve worked on at weekends for years. You’ve bought the domain name and told no one. You’ve dismissed it three times and it keeps coming back, but you can’t see yet whether it would pay.

Or maybe it isn’t a company at all. It’s a portfolio of fractional and advisory work, the thing you always said you’d do “one day”, or a different kind of work altogether, and you’re not sure you’re allowed to want it.

What gets in the way. You give it serious thought, usually late at night. Then the week fills up with coffees and applications, and it slips again. You tell yourself “after the summer”.

Everyone has an opinion about what you should do: your old team, your family, the people watching on LinkedIn. None of them is lying to you, but none of them can be neutral either.

For years you had a scoreboard, with the promo, the scope, the headcount and the OKRs, and you got very good at it. Now the scoreboard has gone, and somewhere along the way the question shifted from what do I want? to what’s the smartest move?

As Dolly Parton said, “Find out who you are and do it on purpose.”

What it looks like when you’ve worked it out. You know what you’re working towards, and you have more energy for it each week. You’re out of bed before the alarm, ready to get going. You’ve stopped managing how you come across, so you say what you think, and you can describe what you do without the logo. And when you’re with your family, you’re actually there, and you enjoy it. For the first time in years, the work feels like it has a purpose.

Who are you, and what are you going to do on purpose?

If we work together, we start with what you want, and give it a full hearing before anyone asks whether it’s sensible. Then we try something small, see what happens, and keep what works. If it’s something of your own, the money matters too: how much runway you have, what it needs to earn, and by when.

I won’t tell you what to do. Another big job is a real answer, and so is building something, or something in between. You could spend another three years working it out, but I’d rather you didn’t.

Richard

If you’d like to work it out with me, here’s how it works →