Quote:
Originally Posted by Misplaced_Chiefs_Fan
I guess I'm lucky in that I had a bunch of other things going on in my life. Work never defined me - it was something I did so I could afford to do other stuff.
I remember meeting my last team lead a couple of years ago. He brought me down for lunch and explained who he was and what his plans were for the team writ large and what he intended to do to help each member of the team advance in their careers.
I stopped him after a bit and said, "John, my only goal at (Company) is to get to retirement in a couple of years. I have no aspirations at being a manager - my last job in the Army had me leading 84 soldiers in 53 separate offices and answering to six different officers at one time or another. I want interesting work, regular hours, and to be left alone to do my job. I don't want a promotion, am not seeking a promotion, and would probably turn down said promotion. So, does that help?"
He looked at me, smiled, and said, "So, how do you feel about football?" It was a very pleasant lunch after that. *grin*
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I'll be honest, I had staff members who were exactly like you and they were some of the most productive and easy people to have on staff. I was in network engineering so it was actually very nice having staff who just wanted to engineer and/or troubleshoot networking issues, but weren't jockeying for the next supervisory job. So my hats off to you for being the dude who made it clear that you were happy where you were and got on to talking football.