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The seven year itch?

· 6 min read
Andy Hawkes
Andy Hawkes

I realised recently that I have now been working at Deltatre for as long as I have worked for any company in my career so far - 6 years and 9 months.

Even if I quit tomorrow my notice period would see me past the 7 year mark, which led me to think about why I have moved on from relatively long-standing employment in the past, and the 7 year figure in particular.

These realisations and questions to myself, along with some recent pondering about age and career direction, led to me wondering what I would want to do next if I decided to move on.

It's not what I would call "a career plan"​

I've previously noted that my career to date has been completely unplanned and generally guided by a mixture of fate, coincidence, impulsive decisions, and good luck, so it's not really in my modus operandi to plan my career moves ahead of time... but given that I am expected to be capable of work for another 17 years before they give me whatever state pension might still exist in the UK then I've probably got another one or two good innings in me if/when I do move on from Deltatre.

Fake it until you make it​

Across my career to date I have had a few interesting changes of scene and sector:

  • 29 years ago I left university with a degree in Economic and Politics and no idea what I wanted to do for a career. A few office jobs came and went while I waited for the proverbial lightning bolt of inspiration, and despite early career highs including scoring a goal past the then current England goalkeeper while dressed as an elephant1, nothing really clicked.
  • 25 years ago I was working for a food company up in Yorkshire when I managed to parlay a free rebuild of the company website in my spare time into a case study to swing a job as "Group Webmaster"2 for a marketing and communications group in big fancy London, starting my career in what was then called "New Media".
  • They sadly showed me the door when the first .com bubble burst, but I quickly found myself working for the British Chambers of Commerce, revitalising their digital presence.
  • After a year of that (and wearing a shirt and tie to work) I had both completed the original task and figured out that I'd rather work somewhere with a more informal vibe, and I managed to move to a role with Cimex, a small digital agency specialising in e-learning and public-sector projects.
  • That's where I hit my current carrer maximum of 6 years and 9 months, progressing from an individual contributor role into a team leader, manager, and someone with the seemingly rare ability to translate effectvely between business and technical domains, and after reaching a role that was unlikely to see much further progression I managed to land a role at one of those big, fancy digital agencies that get called out as one of the 30 most influential companies in the history of the internet, initially to lead the re-development of the corporate website for the largest investment bank in the world.
  • After nearly 5 years of projects for brands like the aforementioned financial behemoth, Aston Martin, Unilever, Google, and McDonalds, I felt like my role had hit a plateau and further progressions was likely to be through dead mens shoes, I decided that it was time for a change. And then very shortly afterwards my former boss left. Thanks Patrick!...
  • After a quick bounce through an interim role with another big-ish agency working on improving technical delivery for Unilever and a certain orange-hued budget airline, I found myself at Indicia, another digital agency, helping them to restructure ther technical offering to move from a principally in-house, home-grown product offering into a more standardised, outsourced model. I spent nearly 3 years there before my successful completion of the transition to an out-sourced model cleverly left my role redundant. D'oh!
  • And so after a couple of very enjoyable months off to decompress over Christmas, the new year, and into the spring I ended up landing a job as a Technical Director at Deltatre, learning a completely new business and technical domain in the form of delivering streaming platforms for big brands. That turned into leading the whole team of delivery TD's, a year focussed on engineering best practice, and now my role as Evil Overlord VP of Product Engineering and Architecture3.

Where to next?​

There is a definite continuity throughout the last 25 years from the fundamental backbone of web and digital technology, but I don't feel like I'm wedded to a specific sector... so what could come next?

While every business is seemingly grabbing wholeheartedly onto the AI bandwagon on the one hand, there is also something of a slow-down in the recrutiment market on the other, especially for someone of my vintage given the dire warnings on LinkedIn in particular that if you're over 50 and have been working in tech for any length of time then you won't now find a new job now.

As someone whose brain is seemingly wired for problem solving, figuring out how things work (or why they're not working properly), and collaborating with other humans to build and run things that sit in the interface gap between humans and computer systems, this is an "interesting" time.

Until such time as an exciting new opportunity comes knocking, I still have work to do at Deltatre - the next year will also be "interesting" as we move forward with technical alignment after the Endeavor Streaming acqusition, and we have features to deliver for clients new and old.

Plus ça change, and all that... 😉

Footnotes​

  1. I was working for Leeds United at the time, processing and filling orders in their mail order merchandise department, and someone said "we need someone to dress up as Ellie the Elephant (the team mascot) and help out with a video we're shooting at the training ground" and that sounded more fun than sorting out merch orders, so that's how that came about. ↩

  2. Fancy job titles that sounded like they should come with a cape and a domino mask were all the rage in 2001. Good times! ↩

  3. Good job titles are still hard. Back in the R/GA days I had a fake desk plaque made up saying "Andrew J Hawkes Esq. BA (Hons) - Acting Assistant Deputy Vice President, Heated Beverage Distribution" as it was the most corporate version of "Tea Boy" that I could come up with. ↩