I’ve been asked a number of times “Why Asia?”, “Why quit your job?”, “How did you do it?”, amongst other variations of the same line of questioning. So here it is.

I had made the decision to leave Rockwell Automation and Cleveland, Ohio in January of 2018, when I had reached three years of employment with Rockwell. The plan was to check out some cities in the summer time and decide where to go and apply for a new job in October and be moving by the end of January. I checked out a bunch of cities and had decided on Austin, Texas. The day I had decided to start applying to jobs in Austin, I ran into an old coworker who offered me a position on a new team that ran an agile environment. As if someone in the company had heard I was planning on leaving, a manager I had worked with in the past offered me a DevOps position.

I went to check out the Agile team and after meeting the team and hearing what they were working on, I was sold. It was a utility role writing code, tests and working on DevOps. A whole product being rolled out by three members. I met the team on a Tuesday and was accepting the position by Friday.

The team ended up being the dream job. Great coworkers, plenty of cool opportunities and a never ending list of different challenges to work on. The downside was it required me to stay in Cleveland and traveling was restricted to a few times a year. This brought back up the leaving Cleveland idea.

I started looking at Austin again but it seemed like I had skipped over Austin last time and maybe something bigger was in order. This is when I began to look at other countries. I have made plenty of friends in Australia and loved my time in Germany. Next, I started looking at Software Engineer positions in those places, but nothing was really peaking my interest job wise. Then it occurred to me that I had my ideal job in the Software industry, but maybe there was something else I want to do more.

I started by looking into other fields I am interested in: fitness or game development. Again, it just felt like I was finding another thing to drag myself to. So I began to look at master’s degrees. I had looked at business master’s because it is something I was unlikely to learn on my own time. A mentor had suggested a one year business master’s in another country so that I could learn another language as well as attain the master’s. He had also suggested aiming for the ones in the top twenty. I had decided to try for INSEAD, IE or Bocconi. After some dedicated research and starting to study for my GMAT, I realized that this was a heavy investment for yet another thing I might not end up liking. So what did I really want to do that I could afford to live doing and appeased interests I already knew I had?

Thailand and Vietnam have always been at the top of my travel list, but the flight time has always been the stopping factor with me doing short trips while having a full time job. I’ve always been interested in Buddhism and martial arts. Asian culture has always fallen in line with my interests. I knew that area of the world was much less expensive than America and had plenty of experience planning budget trips in other parts of the world.

The original plan was to spend a month in Southeast Asia and then decide what I wanted to do with my life. After looking at flights and hostel prices, I realized I could stay there for quite a while until I really figured out what I wanted to do. I realized that my lease and other obligations all came to an end in December and I could walk away with little fuss.

First, I had to tell my family. Most of my family lives in Cleveland and has lived there most of their life, so me leaving a good job to walk around Asia with a backpack probably seemed like I had lost it. Outside of the worries that something bad was going to happen or I would never find a good job again, I think they all sort of expected something like this at some point. Next was the job.

Being the neurotic planner I am, selecting a date to tell my team that I was leaving was a big deal to me. Part of me wanted to tell them that day, three months in advance. I had decided on two months in advance but some friends had suggested that although that was a good friendly move for the team members I am close with, the company had no reason to keep me for two months on a three person team. I decided on a specific date about a month before I was planning to leave.

To my surprise, the engineering lead of the team announced that he was leaving about nine weeks before I planned to leave. The team had decided that he would knowledge transfer most of his responsibilities to me. I immediately planned a meeting with my manager to inform him I was also leaving. After this meeting, I told my product owner and had a meeting planned for the following Monday to tell the rest of the team. Monday morning I got in early and had fully prepared what I was going to say. About fifteen minutes before the meeting, I got a message that it needed to be rescheduled to the next day. The following day, I sort of just blurted out to the team that I was leaving and taking a backpack to Asia. Most of my teammates have lived elsewhere so were very supportive of the move.

So that’s that. The telling people part is over and now I just need to get rid of all my stuff. There’s one answer to one of the questions I tend to get frequently regarding this trip.