how long did you stay with your previous company?
simple, innocuous and a loaded question. loaded simply because it got me to thinking why i am the way i am. now.
stayed 12 years with my first company and am now running 5th with my current. and i am just talking about employment here. 🙂
but in this day and age of too many options and too many temptations, staying put is definitely a challenge. how do i manage to do this? here are the answers i came up with after some introspection.
self-loyalty.
i am loyal to myself. i stay where i am happy, where i am challenged.
i may rant or curse even but for as long as i am not apathetic, and i still get excited, it means everything is still good!
loyalty to your profession.
i have chosen to be software development professional. as of now, i do project management and i aim to be a project manager that matters. i aim to help the project team deliver and deliver what the customer will want to use. should i lose that drive, it means i am at an intersection and a big decision needs to be made.
loyalty to the people you work with.
as they say, there is no I in team. you need your team to deliver things. you need to be truthful to them so they understand how things are going.
management has always been careful about sharing information especially if it is perceived to rock the boat. but wouldn’t it be better to have people who stick it out because they believe in delivering something to the finish?
loyalty also means helping your team get to the point where they are able to function effectively and efficiently. no matter whether you use a carrot and stick or a sink and swim approach, or something else. the point is to equip your team.
loyalty to your product
product in this case is what you are working on. once you are building your product, you need to be faithful to it. being faithful and loyal does not mean being blind to its faults or weaknesses. you work to make it work. if it doesn’t, then the more important thing is to learn from it.
when there comes a point when at least one of these is no longer working for me, it normally means having to stop and listen and evaluate. whatever decision comes out of that, i just stand by that and make it work 🙂
my take 
Nice watch 🙂