Where I see myself in 2024

Mike, my manager, asked me to produce a three-year-plan and a five-year-plan as a means for him to understand the trajectory of my career and know how he can help me arrive. Thoughtful question, even if it does feel a little like homework coming from my boss.

The past few years we’ve barely managed to make yearly goals. The chaos of early childhood has given me a renewed sense of how little is truly under my control. Yet we’ve still managed to achieve nearly everything that we’ve planned to do, with administrative tasks the only ones that get kicked to next year. But that’s too wide a net for this exercise. All Mike needs to know is where I’d like to go in technology, even if the answer is to decide between three options.

One subject in which I’ve had a long-term interest is cybersecurity. I’m passionate about the concepts and find the exercises fascinating. However, from an onlooker’s perspective the day-to-day seems more compliance-oriented than red team/green team exercises, and the weight of expectations, to defend an entire organization from security breaches, seems like a ton of pressure.

I’ve explored software development for over a decade and still enjoy the basics. Writing code, architecting features, applying software patterns and writing integration tests are as fun today as they were when I started. I could easily tinker with these things for five years more; if the actual work wasn’t repetitive. I lose interest after a few months of the same problems and applied solutions.

Then there’s non-technology subjects. I’d considered a management role while at kCura and, though that aspiration was crippled by my own manager’s behavior, it’s still a direction I’d consider. The major fear is that I’ll be dissatisfied if there’s not a technical piece to my work, but that’s not likely.

Three roles, cybersecurity, software development (cloud, on-prem, specialty?), or management. Maybe the plan is to decide between these three in the next three-to-five years?