My decision to leave IBM

I arrived in North Carolina in 2000 to embark on a new job at IBM. Prior to coming to IBM, I had never spent more than 3 years at a company and did not anticipate IBM being any different. Fast forward almost 19 years and what was intended to be a short run at IBM has turned into a career. As the title says, I have decided to finally take the leap and jump on a great opportunity outside of IBM.

Amazing Projects

I will always look back on my career at IBM and be proud of the amazing projects I got to be a part of. One of the comments I heard from a colleague one time was "How do I get to work on these projects you keep on landing? You are always working on the hottest technologies, travel the world and on top of that you get to go to the most amazing conferences". This in a nutshell articulates why it was so hard to leave IBM. I truly did get to work on the most amazing projects and really rode the wave of disruption around web, mobile, cloud and now blockchain.

Outstanding Teams

I would say that the projects would not have meant anything without the greatness of tech talent that I was surrounded with at IBM. In 2017, I shared my vision on building teams that was definitely shaped by my mentors. In the article below, I wrote up a set of characteristics that allowed me to grow my career and also enabled many others to create their own visions and blaze their own amazing and unique career paths both inside and outside of IBM. I will absolutely miss my amazing network of friends, colleagues and mentors from IBM.

Announcement emails

At IBM, many former colleagues send out, on their last day, a general email letting them know that they are leaving IBM and how they can be reached in the future. For me, I found this too cumbersome and not really aligned with my philosophy of transparency. I also wanted to be a proactive and share my decision more broadly with my friends and family as well as many current and previous coworkers. Since I have been lucky to have a strong social network with many colleagues and friends, I felt that LinkedIn was the best medium for sharing such great news!

Please follow me on twitter @todkap and on Medium (https://medium.com/@todkap).