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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 … Continue reading How the Whole Asia Thing Started<\/span>