Five years ago today (September 1, 2019), my family and I stepped off the plane from Seattle to Heathrow, having spent the previous month frantically packing our belongings, saying goodbye to friends, and preparing to pick up our life in the UK, almost thirteen years after we left in 2006.
Our decision to return to the UK had been driven by a number of factors. We’d never intended to spend the rest of our lives in the US (our original plan had been to spend just three years in Seattle; best-laid plans, etc.); we wanted our kid to go to high (ahem, secondary) school in the UK; and UK universities are an awful lot cheaper than their US counterparts. But it was a wrench to leave Seattle, a city we’d hardly known anything about when we’d moved there, but had come to love for its beautiful setting, plethora of child-friendly activities, friendly (but not too friendly) people, if not for its rather uninspired architecture (with some honourable exceptions).
On a professional level, my job at Microsoft (which had taken us to Seattle in the first place) had transformed my career, providing me with a ringside seat at a time of great upheaval for the company: the dismal late-2000s “Do whatever Google does, but worse” era; the rise and fall of Windows Phone (and Nokia); Satya Nadella taking over from Steve Ballmer; and the pivot to the cloud which has transformed its fortunes. I got to work on some very big projects with global impact, rubbing shoulders with people who’ve gone on to very senior positions within the firm, or to start their own very successful companies. It was as hard to step away from Microsoft as it was to leave Seattle.
My life and work since returning to the UK has been very different – I’ve had roles with some big companies (Publicis and Omnicom, two of the advertising industry’s biggest agency groups), but spent the majority of my time as an independent consultant, using what I learned at Microsoft and elsewhere to help my clients figure out their data strategy and how to build a data function that works. I get to do most of this work from my nice home office in the Cotswolds, setting my own hours; no longer do I have to fight my way across Lake Washington and back every day, a blessing any Seattleite can relate to.
But occasionally I do miss the feeling of importance of working at Microsoft. It wasn’t always exciting to work there, and was frequently frustrating, but it did always feel a little bit like you were behind the scenes of one of the early 21st century’s great dramas – the battle of the tech giants. I got a big dose of this nostalgia when I returned to Seattle last month to prepare to put our house on the market, severing our final tangible link to the city. Being back and spending some time with some of my former colleagues had me longing for the days when I felt like a vital part of a big enterprise, managing multimillion-dollar budgets, touching millions of customers, and delivering presentations to VPs and senior leadership team members.
But other memories also flooded back: the long hours; the politics and budget shenanigans; endless pre-pre-pre-meetings to prepare for an important (or sometimes not so important) presentation; the constant worry that you might screw something up and ruin your career; the frustration of seeing something you’d worked hard on get sidelined or cancelled. Working at Microsoft was, quite a lot of the time, a grind. A grind that I do not miss.
With everything that’s happened in the last five years – Covid, a couple of redundancies, forging my way as an independent consultant – it’s taken me a while to get settled with my not-so-new life and build a sense of self-worth that isn’t dependent on whether I’m included on an email chain with the CEO. But I’m content that I made the change. So: farewell, Seattle. I shall continue to miss your mountains, sea, snow and sky, and will always treasure the time (personal and professional) I spent in you. I’ll come visit.