A Slow Divorce With My Industry

In the early 1990’s as unemployment crested past 7.5% and a recession plagued the economy, I was ready to graduate college.  Jobs were hard to come by and things were bleak.  The situation didn’t scare me as much as it perhaps should have because I was teetering on the edge between a productive life or becoming a total deadbeat.

My alcoholism was in full force but the functional part of it had me working two jobs through college and earning money.  As I straddled the delicate knife-edge between the street and sanity I managed to land a low paying job in my industry a few months after graduating. 

I obviously could have never known it at the time, but this stroke of luck set me on a winning glide path that eventually gave me riches beyond what I could have imagined. 

It was also the early days of the love affair that I had with my chosen field.  A love affair that would end in a slow divorce.

 

Lucky Me

Luck plays such a huge role in everyone’s story.  We all experience good and bad luck.  In his book Outliers (<–affiliate link) Malcolm Gladwell tells the story of Bill Gates and his early luck. 

Gates just happened to be in middle school in the late 1960’s when just a handful of schools in the entire country had access to the primitive room-sized computers of the time.  He went to one of those schools in Seattle that had a teletype connection to a computer.  That allowed him to start to learn to program, and the rest is history. 

This does not discount Gates’ hard work, curiosity, and business acumen.  But it all started with Gates being in the right place at the right time, and there are surely thousands of other kids who would have done just as well or better if they had been given the same chance. 

Gates started with luck, but then his hard work gave him returns on his luck that changed the world. 

I too started with some luck.

 

Geography?

I majored in geography in college, and got a certificate in something new at the time called geographic information systems (GIS).  My college was one of the few at the time to have such a certificate. 

I chose geography and more specifically mapping because I loved maps as a kid.  I’d page through atlases endlessly, wondering what it was like in those far-flung places with exotic names.

I won’t bore you with too much about my field, but the theories of what could be done with GIS were known and written about in the 1960’s.  The ability to do them however didn’t come to fruition until the late 1980’s when computers got powerful enough to do the processing. 

I happen to have started college in the late 1980’s.  Perfect timing.  Pure luck. 

And I landed a job at a small company – what we’d call a startup now – that just happened to be at the big-bang center of the GIS revolution.  More luck.

GIS progressed rapidly.  By the mid 1990’s industry insiders predicted a market that would explode to hundreds of millions of dollars.  They were wrong.  It went into the hundreds of billions and beyond. 

Mapping and location data are now a part of virtually everything and are the drivers for entire industries.  I was lucky enough to be involved in the industry in the very early days.  

 

I Love You

My luck and backstory matter because by the time I moved over to the government it was clear that I knew more than virtually everyone at my agency about GIS.  And it allowed me to move up fast. 

I loved GIS and very often loved my job, depending on who I was working with.  I’d travel all over the globe giving talks at conferences and hob-knob with major industry players.  I had personal relationships with the authors of the textbooks being used to teach GIS in colleges. 

I lived, breathed, and bled GIS for many many years and even had a second job teaching it at a local university for almost two decades. 

But after 20-something years in the thick of it all, I noticed things were changing. 

 

You’ve Changed

My enthusiasm for GIS was waning.  The industry itself was now a juggernaut and was progressing faster than ever.  It was virtually impossible to track all the major players, and what company was buying what other company on any given day. 

GIS was also becoming much more technical, and kind of merging with data sciences.  I actually love technology and had even coded some software in my career, but coding didn’t light me up.  I liked proving I could do it, but would dread having to do it everyday.

Meanwhile my career had taken me from a productive analyst to a manager, and that played a big factor in souring my outlook about my day to day work and as a proxy, GIS in general. 

I can’t put a date on it, but one day I realized I was in a slow divorce with GIS.  Where do I go to file papers?

 

It’s Not You It’s Me

If GIS were a person and I had to announce that wanted a divorce, I would probably say “It’s not you it’s me”.  Yes, I did just list a bunch of things that I don’t like about the industry anymore. 

But a broader and more self-aware analysis would consider me, Dave.  I wrote about how I have both a technical and creative side to my brain in a post years ago.  It’s one of my more popular posts. 

And that’s what it boils down to in the end.  I want a divorce with GIS because I enjoy being a creative, and GIS doesn’t fulfill that need.  Sure, there are pockets in the industry that allow for creativity, but it’s mostly a STEM thing. 

I’ve done my STEM time, it’s time to design, write, and play “Whole Lotta Love” on 11 with extra gain on the amp. 

 

Still Friends

It’s very difficult to find data about how many people change careers over time due to the difference of opinion about what constitutes a career change.  Many probably guess it’s more common in 2021 than in 1980, but I’m not so sure. 

Either way most career changes happen because of a slow divorce.  Someone thought they loved an industry or occupation and then one day didn’t anymore. 

I’m in a slow divorce with GIS and I’m okay with that.  There were some great times, we had a good run.  I still want to be friends, I just don’t want to be married to her. 

This change of heart happened over a long period of time.  I didn’t come home to find GIS cheating on me. 

The hard part of moving on for anyone is to have the awareness of where you are on the “spectrum of love” with your chosen field, and more importantly, knowing when to file divorce papers when that place isn’t ideal. 

Most important of all, financial independence is the magical super power that gives me the confidence to ask for a divorce, and to pursue my creativity.