Personal thoughts on leaving my role at Mozilla

I haven't been blogging much recently, but it's time to change that - like multiple things in my life that are changing right now. And as a first post, here is a very personal message.

I'll start with the most important piece first: My contract with Mozilla is ending in a week.

I was told about this right before a weekend of packing up my last belongings into boxes and a week of taking over a new condo, getting it into inhabitable shape and moving in, and ever since then I spent a lot of time thinking - even time that should have been sleeping but ended up tossing and turning instead.

I'm not sure I'm at the end of the process of taking this all in (probably not), but I realized how dangerous it can be if you are very passionate about the the goals of your employer and your job and identify with your role: It's easy to ignore signs of problems and paper over dissatisfaction with what you are doing.

I always said that I converted a hobby to job - and that's true in terms of contributing to Mozilla, about project management, about investigating data and finding out things from its details that I can break down and sum up for a birds-eye-view management audience. But there's a number of things I did in the last 5 years that I would not have taken on without getting paid for it, esp. when it comes to the constant vigilance of watching topcrash reports, playing whack-a-mole on all those tiny crashes, being in a constant circle of negative news and being the bearer of bad news, just to get to a conclusion at the end of the cycle that this beta now isn't distinctively worse than the last one and being OK to ship it (I rarely got to the "enthusiastic about shipping it", esp. in the recent year or so), and never getting larger success experiences or time to breathe and work on some more automation and cleaning up of technical debt. And all that despite usually spending 45 paid hours per week on this, without paid holidays or days off (the curse of being a contractor).
All that said, even though it wore me down, made me grumpy, had me on the edge, making sarcastic comments, and rarely but surely made me lose my temper, I think I helped us pretty well to come out with a decent product that we can be proud of, even though we could do a lot better (and work is going on that is targeted at actually getting us there).

Being a very emotional person who is very passionate about Mozilla's Mission and Manifesto, I ended up identifying so much with the job that crash spikes shipping to beta and not being fixed fast was something I partially took as personal failures and general stability levels being constant or possible getting slightly worse made me not seeing myself as having success. For a long time, I could take the enthusiasm about new projects at Mozilla that pushed our mission (like Persona and Firefox OS) and successes of Mozilla in general to make myself happy and feel successful, but when Mozilla canceled a number of those this year in an effort to consolidate and focus (which is good), I lost that and started to project my job frustration onto Mozilla as a whole, which isn't a healthy mindset as well.

The fun of the job was mostly in the time I spent on creating dashboards, new analyses and dig into data to answer questions and find new information from it - but that was both something I didn't get to as much as I wanted to due to the routine parts taking so much time, and it was the first piece that people tried to help me with to take load off my shoulders - which is a nice gesture but left me with a feeling of threat as it would take away the only things I got success experiences out of.

The really sad part about this is that this all put me into a very toxic state and my communication skills, which normally would be an explicit strength of mine, ended up being very unstable (pun intended) and making me worse in that project management areas I actually wanted to grow at.

My environment and personal life also was not helpful (I plan to blog about the dangers of working remotely from a single home at a later point), and though I started working on a series of improvements in the last weeks, it probably was way too late and too lite, and it would maybe have calmed me a bit but not have changed the situation I had gotten myself into as described above.

So, a line had to be drawn here. I wish it wouldn't have been this harsh and would have only entailed getting rid of the toxic pieces and staying involved in the others, but this is how it happened. I also hope that some opportunity for project management, possibly connected to data analysis (hey, I just learned the pipelines to get useful stuff out of Telemetry!) will open up for me again, ideally even at Mozilla. I'm pretty good at translating between what different people want and need, from the big picture view to the detailed problems and back, and on coordinating projects, so I'm sure there will be an opportunity somewhere - we'll see what the future will bring.

And after all, I just showed myself that I can be a pretty decent project manager: I had planned out that I would take over my new condo and move in within a week - originally to keep work distractions at a minimum. It took quite some coordination and planning beforehand, being prepared for last-minute changes, communicating well with all the different involved people and making informed but swift decisions at times - and it worked out perfectly. Sure, to put it into IT terms, there were and are a few bugs left after "shipping" and there's still a lot of followup work to do (need more furniture etc.) but I was sleeping and living in this place the 6th night after I got the keys, so the project "shipped" on time.
I'm looking forward to doing the same for future work projects, wherever they will manifest.