When I resigned from my last job, my manager’s manager pulled me into a conference room privately to convince me to stay. They wanted to make me a counter offer (these are pretty much always failures; DO NOT EVER TAKE A COUNTER OFFER. DON’T BE WEAK). My then manager had relocated to the LA office, so he was “managing” me remotely. To be quite blunt, he was never really a manager, more just someone who checked in with me on status of action items and to make sure everything was on track; I learned zilch from him. He could barely stick up for himself, much less the rest of his small team. The moment I realized I needed to look for a new job was when a superior on the team, new, German, and working remotely, attacked him during a team call (he hated my boss and thought he was one of the most incompetent people he’d ever met… and made this painfully obvious in pretty much every encounter), and I actually had to stand up for my boss and respond (to which the German responded quite well, might I say). But my manager’s manager was another story; she was fierce, articulate, shamelessly honest and was viewed by many people at the company as “ruthless and only in it for herself.” It’s hard for me to say this about her because there’s a glass ceiling for women in every industry, and although I didn’t agree with some of the things she said and did, I admired the fact that she had elevated herself to the level she was at in spite of the invisible but obvious gender barriers…. not to mention she’s a person of color. As women, we feel like we need to “act like a man” to succeed, to be more competitive and cut throat, so could I really blame her?

What she said to me in that room that day I resigned — I will remember forever. “Leaving here will be the biggest mistake of your career,” she admonished me. “You will regret leaving.” Fear is what was in her voice, even if she wouldn’t admit it herself. She didn’t want to lose an integral member of this team, one she actually respected and thought highly of. “We need strong women like you at this company,” she insisted. “We would not be sitting in this room right now if I didn’t care about you or wanted you to stay.” Well, no one ever said that to me before I said I was leaving, so thanks for the compliment.

So here I am, just over three and a half years later, about to begin a new role at another technology company. And I am remembering these words she spoke to me. I was so desperate to leave the agency world then that I took the first and only job offer I got from a tech startup; everyone else wanted to pigeon-hole me and make me consider more agency roles. I don’t regret leaving. I didn’t leave to go to the best company in the world, nor did I go to a company where I would stay until we would leave New York the way I naively imagined. The last three years career-wise have been eye-opening, excruciating, painful, angry, complacent, many times boring, and uninspiring. Many moments, I wondered to myself if I even belonged in the tech industry; maybe I just wasn’t thick-skinned enough. For the first time in my young career, I was extremely cognizant of my gender, my race, my culture, and not in a good way. For the first time, I saw extremely unethical behavior by people considered to be my superiors, and I was expected to turn a blind eye to it. But it’s all over now. I was able to live my life outside of work the way I wanted, working remotely, traveling the country and world, and getting engaged and married during that time even though I had colleagues who didn’t genuinely care about my life events and showed superficial interest. This was a stepping stone in my career, a gateway to better opportunities, and a rude awakening to me that I need to stick up for myself more and be more fierce. There were things I could have done differently, too. I don’t have regrets in general. But if I did have one regret career wise, it was that I didn’t leave this place sooner, as I had interviewed during multiple periods over the last 3.5 years and just stopped out of complacency and the fact they kept giving me raises and promotions. Complacency gets the best of us.

I won’t be as naive again, though. I won’t think that this new opportunity is going to be the greatest thing since sliced brioche, that I’ll be at this company forever, and or we’ll ride into the sunset together. I am optimistic about it because of everyone I met and how authentic everyone seemed, but I won’t X out the potential bad things that always have the potential of happening. It’s okay to be realistically optimistic. I just want to move forward and live my life.