The Slack Message That Ended My Corporate Career

I remember the day I knew I had to get out of corporate America for good.

I was standing in the middle of the emergency operations room. Phones were ringing. People were dealing with life or death calls. We were trying to cut over to a new dispatch system, and it was not going smoothly.

We had already had a bad day the day before. We had postponed the go-live due to system issues. We had worked late to resolve the problems. I was sending hourly updates to the C-suite, my boss, and the full chain of command so everyone knew exactly what was happening.

Then I got a Slack message from my boss during yet another crisis point in the go-live.

“How’s it going?”

How’s it going?  I had been sending updates every hour. How could he not know how it was going?

Then, in the same message, he asked:

“And why didn’t you do the server impact evaluation during the planning phase six month ago?”

That was the moment.

I realized I was working to the point of collapse, trying to save a go-live, sending updates into the abyss, and nobody was even reading them - but instead they were beating me up for unrelated administrative activities from 6 months ago.

I was good at my job. I was doing everything I was supposed to do, for both success in the position and for what I had been taught led to long-term stability.

But the work was draining me. Nothing I was doing seemed to matter. It had reached the point where I was crying in my car every day at lunch, struggling to just make it through until 5PM.

That was when I knew: I could not keep doing this.

But I had no idea what to do.

I knew the answer was not just “go get another job.”

Because I had done that before. Over and over. For almost 20 years.

I had changed jobs. I had changed roles. I had changed industries. I kept thinking, “Maybe the next one will be better.”

But eventually I learned something important:

If you do not know what kind of work actually fits who you are at your core, you can keep changing jobs and still keep recreating the same burnout.

I thought that by moving to IT and climbing the ladder, I would be able to have a large impact on the people that worked for me, on the clients I served, and on the wider world. Yet I was drowning under administrative responsibilities. But this time, the burnout was so strong and oppressive that I couldn’t see my way out. 

So I started looking for any route out of the stress. I tried applying for similar jobs at other companies, but even thought of doing project management at another corporation with no soul caused my stomach to tie itself in knots.

I kept coming back to what I loved doing - helping people. The desire to help was the thread that ran though every job, every career change, and even my hobbies. But how to do that without ending up burned out again?

It was time to exercise my career resilience again. Because here's the thing nobody told me: it's not a skill you use once.

It's not "survive corporate, then relax." It's not "find the right job, then you're done."

It's something you keep practicing, the same way you keep practicing anything that matters.

I'd just been doing it by accident. Now I help other people do it on purpose — before they waste twenty years figuring it out themselves.