Bikes! Coffee! Fall colors! After last year’s far-too-fun return to coffeeneuring, I eagerly awaited this year’s challenge from Chasing Mailboxes.

But wait. WTF is coffeeneuring?

A riff on the cycling sport randonneuring, coffeeneuring is, at its core, riding your bike to a place to drink coffee. This year’s challenge was as follows:

Between October 11 through November 24, 2025:

• ride your bike 7 times,
• to at least 6 different places
• at least 2 miles round trip every time
• drink 7 total cups of coffee (or another fall-type beverage),
• and document your coffeeneuring

I’ve done similar challenges in past years:

• 2014 Errandonnee challenge
• 2016 Errandonnee challenge
• 2024 Coffeeneuring challenge

The rides

1. October 23 - 4.6 miles - through the neighborhood and Woony bike path to my coworking space. Coffee from the shared kitchen.
2. October 24 - 9.1 miles - Providence Bike Jam, Halloween edition! I met up with friends and stayed very toasty (too toasty) in a unicorn onesie. It was a nice night and there were a lot of us out. An unnamed beverage was enjoyed.
3. November 5 - 4.6 miles - coworking again! Yes, the first couple weeks of the challenge were a little boring. Coffee and typing.
4. November 2 - 5.3 miles - off to Ogie’s Trailer Park for a new friend’s birthday party. Happy birthday, Travis! Enjoyed a fall ale and snuck in a trip to the co-op market too.
5. November 8 - 13.0 miles - absolutely stunning day on the East Bay Bike Path. My sweetie dropped me off in East Providence and I pedaled to Riverside to meet up for coffee at Borealis with a new friend. Enjoyed a nice long roll back home through Providence.
6. November 16 - 7.4 miles - took the ebike to the secret coffee shop by the river to join in celebration of Angela’s birthday, then ran errands in the West End.
7. November 24 - 5.2 miles - “OMG, it’s the last day of the challenge! Off to New Harvest - oh no, it’s closed, Seven Stars it is!” I took advantage of the 50-degree weather and took the ebike to enjoy an afternoon tea. Ran into a friend before I set off for home.

Observations

This challenge was, as always, a much-needed additional excuse to get out on the bike and go. Most of the year I am a functional rider - using the bike to go places and do things. Coffeeneuring requires that I have some fun with it, and with the changing seasons and shortening days it’s always a way to connect with the outside world before winter sets in.

This fall’s challenge was more of a stretch than last, mostly because the weather seems to’ve gotten cooler faster than last year, and rainier too. I had more going on this fall, too, which I don’t really mind.

One connecting thread of this year’s rides is how many were social. Heading into our fourth (!) fall in New England, my wife and I are really feeling connected in Providence. This fall has felt heavy as fascism continues to take hold in the U.S., but we continue to build connections locally, meet our neighbors and cultivate friendships and community here. I turned 41 right in the middle of this challenge and heard from so many folks near and far. It’s a serious time, but it’s not a hopeless time.

On a much lighter note, my wife and I are talking seriously about getting a second ebike. We bought our REI house-brand cargo ebike on sale shortly after we moved here in summer 2022 and are just shy of 1,000 miles on it as of today. The ebike is technically my wife’s, but I ride it often - it’s functionally our second car. A second one would mean we could go on rides together more easily and potentially reduce our car use even more. It’s fun to think about.

One thing that’s been missing is being able to have an idea of which pages on my website are getting visits, and what some of the referring sites are.

After successfully setting up Webmentions for Jekyll to capture incoming mentions from other website creators (an entirely different post!), I decided to look for an easy way to collect usage data from the site.

Measuring use, not users

Before I started looking at options, I reflected on what data I wanted to gather:

• which pages on my site are being accessed,
• how many times, and
• how people got there.

I didn’t want to collect data about the people using my site - just how it’s being used.

Tech requirements

I’ve worked with a number of web analytics tools over the years - AwStats, Urchin, Google Analytics, Matomo. GA is the giant player because it is free and thus ubiquitous. (Check out the Google Analytics stats on BuiltWith if you want to truly see how popular it is.) And as the adage goes, when a product with this many features is free, it’s because you and your users are the product.

Beyond my privacy concerns with Google Analytics, I just don’t need all of that! I get overwhelmed when I log in to check on other projects I’m working on because the UI is just so impenetrable. I don’t need all that data, and I certainly don’t need to be calling all those Javascript files and trackers all over my website.

When I started looking at alternatives, I wanted a tool that:

• Has a non-Javascript option
• Only collects the info I want to collect
• Doesn’t invade my visitors’ privacy
• Is hosted or easily hosted by me
• Is easy to use and understand
• Is low-cost

Choosing SimpleAnalytics

I did some shopping around, and to my delight, there are some really fantastic options out there for privacy-respecting analytics packages, many of them from Europe due to the GDPR requirements.

Of the many products I explored, SimpleAnalytics was one that matched my list of requirements best because it can be used without Javascript.

No Javascript required

The instructions for installing SimpleAnalytics are straightforward: call an external Javascript file, and if your users have Javascript turned off, use a tracking GIF as a fallback. The GIF returns less data than the Javascript method does (which is actually great!). Even better, the image file can be the primary way that data makes it to SimpleAnalytics, rather than just a fallback.

But also maybe some light Javascript

After tinkering with the GIF-only analytics implementation a bit, I realized I could send more information consistently using the GIF if I added some parameters to the URL for the image file. The data points I really wanted to capture reliably were referrer, which isn’t available by default with the GIF, and page path , which can be reported less reliably using the GIF.

To be able to identify these variables and add them to the link to the GIF, I’d need to add some Javascript on the page. One of the things I loved about moving to Jekyll was that I didn’t have any Javascript on my site, but adding these few lines was an acceptable compromise for me - still better than calling a huge external file, and it also allowed me to hand-tailor what attributes I sent to analytics.

Here’s where I landed - a quick script in the footer template of my site that…

• pulls in the full hostname and pathname of the current page
• grabs the referring URL if there is one
• concatenates everything into the full URL to the GIF
• builds an <img> tag to render the GIF on the page and send the analytics

Code

Note: I wrote another version of this script that collects the user’s time zone, just to complete the set of attributes that can be sent using the GIF with SimpleAnalytics.

Second note: Yes, I realize that embedding a Gist is embedding an external Javascript. The difference here is that it’s not on every single page of my site, and it isn’t tracking users.

We’ll see!

The SimpleAnalytics free plan keeps the data for only 30 days, which is also a feature and not a bug to me. I signed myself up for weekly reports in my email inbox so I can set it and forget it.

This is yet another example of choosing to change tech platforms and just seeing what happens. This is a really low-stakes test for me and was very gratifying to get up and running.

Postscript: Making shit feels good

With this and my other tech-focused posts this year, I’ve been finding a lot of grounding during a time of looming fascism in the USA by being able to enter a flow state, learn some new stuff, and create something with my hands. Ethan Marcotte has written about this on his blog and I continue to think about how, coupled with other actions in our communities, making things can be a way to keep sane and build a future we want to see. Even if it’s 12 lines of Javascript code.

Our digital ecosystem is big, and there are scores of teams using our design system to build their products (What is a design system?). Our design system has been around a while, it’s super-robust, and it has buy-in across the organization. My team’s main job is to meet with other teams throughout their design process to make sure that the teams’ products align with the rest of the website, meet web and accessibility standards, and of course, use our design system appropriately.

This doesn’t happen all the time, but there are some recurring patterns I’ve observed as product teams work with our design system. I don’t think this is unique to our context; I’d wager that these are totally normal things that happen when a design system matures and is in active use by a lot of teams.

1. Design by number

What it is

Instead of designing an experience or an interaction, the team puts design system components on a page (or in a Figma file) to create an interface, without thinking about the actual user experience. Components are chosen because of how they look, not because of what they do. It’s not UX so much as paint by number. The design has features you recognize, but that’s where the familiarity ends.

Why it happens

• Inexperienced designers: Designers who take this approach are often new or inexperienced, undersupported, or stretched too thin.
• Free-ranging stakeholders: A non-designer stakeholder is exerting undue influence on the design, or is being inflexible about business rules, and designers are not empowered or knowledgeable enough to push back. Common signals that a stakeholder is pulling the strings:
  • ”We’ll need to get approval for that change.”
  • “Our stakeholder said we need to do it this way.”

The result

If you have a pre-launch QA process for products (as we do), those design issues, if not caught early, result in a ton of problems that need to be fixed before the product goes live. If those findings aren’t deemed important enough to fix before go-live, they go to the team’s backlog to die, and the user experience suffers.

If the product ships as-is, it looks like the rest of your site in some ways, but it’s unusable, inaccessible (or 508-compliant only, rather than truly accessible) and you’re not sure what it’s supposed to do. It doesn’t actually help your users.

Interventions

• Designers: Focus on clearly defining the problem to be solved, creating user flows before moving to the toolbox of high-fidelity tools.
• Designers: Design for mobile first Designing for a small screen (or high browser zoom) streamlines design and really forces decision-making about the most important elements and interactions. If the page was laid out in one long line, what should the sequence of elements be? What headings would need to be present to help convey the content grouping and hierarchy? This results in a more accessible experience for most users, especially users who rely on assistive technologies like screen readers.
• Leaders: Mentor junior teams and designers. This problem is not specifically a design system problem, but it’s exacerbated by a readily available component library. It’s moreso an underdeveloped design ethos. Seasoned, user-centered UX designers who are trusted, mentored, and supported to do good work will know and do better. These folks not only have more experience, but are also prepared to push back when stakeholders ask for something that’s a bad solution. Junior designers can grow into this skillset if they have good mentors.

2. First-solution inertia

What it is

Because robust design systems and Figma libraries make it easier to rapidly develop high-fidelity prototypes, a team’s early design ideas can sometimes ossify too fast. At first glance, the solution seems good. On second glance, it’s clear there is something not quite right, and there is an increasing number of boo-boos being covered up. The sunk cost fallacy leads teams to keep as much of what they’ve got as possible, even if what they actually need to do is scrap it and start again.

Why it happens

• Jumps to solutioning: The design problem hasn’t been completely defined. Key information, constraints or business rules are missing.
• Favoritism: Someone (maybe a non-designer stakeholder?) has fallen in love with an early solution and doesn’t want to change course.
• Iteration creep: The design started as one thing, but has iterated so much that its functionality has left the bounds of its original design completely and no longer makes sense.
• Hotfix glue gun: The design doesn’t accommodate unanticipated stress cases, or doesn’t do well in user testing. “Adjustments” are made by adding on hotfixes rather than addressing the root issue.
• Looming deadlines: a team is far down the road with a high-fidelity design and it’s hard to stop, or to incorporate late-breaking changes, before they have a deadline to complete their work.

The result

The result is something that just ain’t quite right, an incomplete or overly complex solution that has gaps for some users with “non-standard” use cases. It’s an increasingly brittle interface that makes maintenance a bottomless pit until it can be rebuilt. This’ll create frustrating experiences for users, and it’ll be an interface that they have to learn over and over again.

Interventions

• Designers: Go lo-fi first, even when hi-fi is easy: Build lower-fidelity artifacts early in the process, even when it’s easier to jump straight into the weeds with design software. Focus on user flows, rather than getting every single detail right in the wireframes.
• Designers: Research early: Do research with users before letting the design harden.
• Designers: Engage peer reviewers: Get another set of heuristic eyes on your designs. (Either through a governance process or via peer feedback.) Bring your questions.
• Leadership: Build in slack time: Account for time in the project to make potentially breaking changes. Ensure the team is consistently revisiting those user flows from earlier in your design process to make sure you’re solving the right problems the right way.

3. Disengagement

What it is

Teams use the design system to design experiences (perhaps quite well!) but don’t contribute to the design system’s growth. Or, they may craft workarounds when the design system doesn’t do things exactly as needed, rather than suggesting changes.

Why it happens

• Lack of support from leadership: Teams aren’t incentivized, encouraged, or given space to contribute back to the design system and allow it to continue to grow, so it stagnates.
• Technical debt: Teams don’t have time to contribute to the design system because their backlog is too big, they’re moving too fast, or they are simply prioritizing other work.
• Gatekeeping: The process for contributing to the design system is opaque, or onerous, or locked down to only one team (or person!). If community members feel like they can’t or shouldn’t contribute to the design system, they don’t.
• Inflexible/rigid design system: The design system isn’t helping the teams solve their problems, or is incomplete. Or, the team’s engagement with the design system is more punitive (“Fix this or else”) than generative (“Let’s make sure this component does what you need it to do”). Rather than being seen as a toolbox, it’s a checkbox.

The result

The implications for this are system-wide. The overall user experience of your digital ecosystem can suffer. Stale, inflexible experiences don’t evolve with the times, or worse, teams abandon design system components to craft their own experiences, creating long-term maintainability problems. The end result is a degraded experience for your users, a maintainability quagmire, and inconsistent designs across your platform. In my work context, this is something we work very hard to avoid.

Interventions

• Leadership: Prioritize contributions: Product owners/product managers build time in for their teams to contribute to the design system, and actively encourage them to do so.
• Design system leads: Make contributions a snap: Design system owners should pave avenues for teams to make or suggest updates to the design system. The process for new additions to the design system, code updates or new documentation should be well-documented, communicated, and streamlined, including (and especially) for newcomers or novice coders.
• Governance and design system leads: Listen and adapt: Inflexible, brittle design systems with overly complicated processes, obtuse approval processes, or hard-to-use tech stacks are expensive to maintain because they are brittle. It’s crucial to have clear processes for using, expanding on, updating, or even retiring items from the design system. Humans who are responsible for the design system want product designers to use the system in a consistent way; but conversely, they must be listening for ways the design system can flex to meet changing needs.

tl;dr: Design systems are people

Technology is people. Design systems are people, too. Most of the issues here, and their solutions, involve deeply human stuff like relationship-building, conversation, clear documentation, conflict resolution, and feedback loops.

Like any other technology, design systems need attentive care, maintenance, upgrades, and human stewards to ensure that they’re used to do the thing they’re supposed to do. The key is being prepared to support the entire design system, including the people who are building with it.

I’d been disappointed for a while in hearing about how poorly Spotify compensates artists, how its business model involves boosting the most mid-sounding music, and how it was starting to use AI to generate “original” music so they didn’t have to pay human musicians. This post from Hearing Things sealed the deal for me. When the CEO invested in AI weapons I realized I could take my monthly subscription fees elsewhere, so I did.

Evaluating alternatives

The big streaming competitors that seemed to have the largest music catalogs are Apple Music and Tidal. Their costs are the exact same as Spotify. I didn’t want to give Apple any more of my data, plus my nephews, who are on my family plan, don’t have Apple devices. So, Tidal won.

Migrating playlists

The primary thing I needed to be able to do to make this switch was migrate playlists. I had about 50, but my wife had over 200, and she is extremely careful about protecting the integrity of her playlists. For a one-time fee of $11.50, I was able to move over all of our playlists from Spotify to Tidal using TuneMyMusic. TuneMyMusic also offers playlist migrations to/from many other platforms. Can’t recommend it highly enough.

Coverage

I was worried that Tidal wouldn’t have as big a catalog as Spotify. When I migrated my playlists and favorite artist lists over, I had about 98% coverage, which was enough for me. If coverage had been less than 95%, it probably would’ve been a dealbreaker. (For context, my wife and I were both college radio DJs and we still like to listen to weird shit in addition to our more popular faves.)

Sound quality

One of Tidal’s differentiators is its focus on high-quality sound. I had really forgotten what it was like to hear high-fidelity, lossless music from my streaming service. It made me sad to think of all the years I spent listening to super-compressed music on Spotify. It is truly a joy to listen to music at my desk, in my car, and in my headphones, and I feel like I’m rediscovering the same tunes I have been listening to over the years.

Podcasts, audiobooks

A couple things Tidal doesn’t have: podcasts and audiobooks.

I’m not really a podcast listener, but I had occasionally listened to podcasts on Spotify. I realized I already have an easy-to-use podcast app on my phone that could fill the gap. It’s called…Podcasts. Yes, I know. Please clap.

For audiobooks (which I admittedly listen to even less frequently), I’ve been checking out audiobooks through my library’s Libby app. For future book purchases I’ll be checking out Libro.fm.

Why I’m posting about this

I’m sharing this information with y’all because it’s a reminder that moving to new digital services doesn’t always have a high switching cost. A lot of the time, it just takes a few minutes, maybe a few bucks, and a commitment to doing the thing. I feel relieved that I’m spending my money in a way that feels more in line with my values and I am grateful that I am still able to enjoy my tunes.

Similarly, I’ve made some other changes in my tech-life to reduce my reliance on single vendors, to keep specific companies from having so much of my data, to avoid AI defaults, to improve privacy, or to avoid bloatware.

Other tech stack switches I’ve made recently:

• Chrome to Firefox for web browsing
• Notion to Obsidian for note-taking and writing (less app bloat, no AI “features”)
• Google to DuckDuckGo for web search (no AI by default, better privacy)
• Wordpress to Jekyll for publishing this site (less bloat, more hands-on code)
• Calendly to Cal for appointment scheduling (less expensive, same features)

It’s never too late!

More about PDN:

The Prosocial Design Network connects research to practice toward a world in which online spaces are healthy, productive, respect human dignity, and improve society.

Here’s their recap of the event, and a video of our Q&A segment (15 minutes).

They shared the questions in advance, which I very much appreciated! Here are my prepared notes - we certainly didn’t cover it all during the call.

What principles should be front of mind in designing inclusive digital spaces, particularly social spaces?

First off, hire people with different lived experiences from yours. Hire trans people. Hire Black people. Hire disabled people. Hire disabled Black trans people. Let them cook. Listen to them. Otherwise you are, as my wife says, “Pissing into the wind.”

Prioritize accessibility. Ensure spaces are accessible for users on many devices, using different device settings, in different contexts in the real world including with assistive technologies. Often accessibility is an afterthought. Shift left and allow it go drive your design and architecture decisions from the jump. For social apps, this includes setting smart defaults - i.e. requiring folks to add alt text if they’re uploading images.

Keep your tech stack light and boring. Design for a 4-year-old Android phone on a 3g connection, with bandwidth paid for by the megabyte. Bloatware takes longer to load and harms or disincentivizes participation from folks on slower connections or older tech.

Design for trust, privacy and safety. Design for people to be able to protect their privacy, control what they share and what they see.

• Don’t ask for information you don’t need, and tell people why you’re asking for what you do need.
• Make privacy and sharing settings crystal clear.
• Remind folks that no site is 100% secure even if you’re encrypting every bit.
• Provide feedback/reporting mechanisms.
• Allow people to block/opt out of interacting with others or groups, or types of content.
• Don’t overpromise! If you have gaps or areas still under development, name them.
• Have good documentation and support. Don’t leave people wondering what to do.
• Look to successful, intentionally-designed communities - like BlackSky - for cues about designing inclusive, safe spaces.

Allow people to define themselves. The way you do it ain’t the way everybody else does it.

• Be aware of any type of binary options when it comes to identifying themselves - not just gender, but everything else. Are you technical or nontechnical? Employed or unemployed? Full-time or part-time? In all of these cases it’s not so clear.
• Think in terms of checkboxes, not radios. Tagging, not categorizing.
• Give people freedom in choosing avatars or profile images.
• Give people freedom to change/update usernames and login email addresses without hassle.
• Don’t make inferences about who people are or what they’d like based on their gender, race or other things that they choose to share with you.
• Confront your own ideas about people having one “true identity” - like a real name policy or assuming that everyone has the same interactions with everyone in their lives in every context. We certainly know this is true because 4chan exist(ed) - but let’s also remember that this might be the way that a trans person tries on a new name for the first time.

You may have noticed this isn’t necessarily specific to trans-inclusive design. That’s because this is the kind of work that, by considering folks in marginalized positions, benefits everyone. It’s the curb cut effect for accessibility AND privacy AND safety AND inclusion. By focusing our design on the margins we include everyone between them too.

Since you wrote your article in 2019, what are fails sites continue to make when it comes to trans inclusive design?

The biggest fail I continue to see is that folks are asking for gender or sex information at all, because it is usually not needed. It usually means that this data is being brokered into a database somewhere and sold for money.

I don’t need to tell you my gender to book a hotel. Why are you asking for it?

The unnecessary asking for gender gets worse now that we are seeing a rollback of previous progress in inclusive design we had made in the past few years. We’d been doing so well! The US Web Design system had a really thoughtful pattern about asking for gender that was starting to roll out to all these government forms. But now agencies are in the process of removing the pattern for asking for gender in an inclusive way, and replacing it with a binary option for sex.

These design systems changes are in addition to removing all references to being trans from websites, and no longer offering services or information for trans people. It’s a very literal erasure of trans identity. It’s really upsetting, scary, and for trans folks, it’s existential.

I encourage practitioners to plan ahead for the moment when you are asked to do something that you know is wrong. That day will come. What will you say? What will you say no to? What’s your red line?

What new concerns do you have with AI and do you have any advice for tech folk?

I have a lot of concerns with AI. I do think there are useful applications for the technology, and 99.99% of the applications out there are either actively predatory, passively harmful, gratuitous and mid, or all of the above. And they are all harming the environment and our health.

1. Garbage in, garbage out. AI is pattern recognition. And the patterns it’s trained on are filled with bias! Bias harms people who are in the minority. According to a recent study out of Stanford:

   “synthetically generated texts from five of the most pervasive LMs …perpetuate harms of omission, subordination, and stereotyping for minoritized individuals with intersectional race, gender, and/or sexual orientation identities.” - Laissez-Faire Harms: Algorithmic Biases in Generative Language Models (2024)

2. …and this includes code. When AI is trained on design patterns or code that is widely popular, but that also includes a lot of code that’s inaccessible or unusable, the resulting code is also inaccessible or unusable. We should also be extremely wary of any AI tool that claims it can refactor a codebase written in a language that most modern coders are not using.

3. AI is a tool of capitalism and state violence. Generative AI is being used to consolidate, analyze, and generate information in a way that can be used to surveil, prosecute, incarcerate, and kill people.

4. AI is seen as a smart humanoid. People tend to believe algorithms more than each other as task complexity increases - but we also tend to view AI as human-like. We anthropomorphize AI tools by giving them human-like names or designing them as chat prompts (rather than command prompts or even search boxes), which leads us to believe that we are in fact talking with another living being rather than a computer. It also leads some folks to think that AI will become sentient. It won’t, actually, but it will if humans believe that it is, which is perhaps worse.

5. AI is mid. And by that, I mean that what it produces is functionally a middle-of-the-road, average, non-“edge case” output. This flattens our differences and creates a “norm” which actually does not exist. Individual people aren’t “normal”, but AI sure likes to tell us that’s a thing, and that really harms people who are far from that norm. Saying that everyone is the same denies the fact that we are all weird as hell. It’s our differences that make us stronger, more creative, better.

6. Critique is painted as fear. Proponents of AI say that skeptics are “afraid” of AI or don’t understand it. I, for one, am not afraid of it - I’m frustrated by how folks are positioning it as the solution to all our problems. I do understand it! I know too much. Dismissing AI detractors as “fearful” allows proponents to dismiss valid critique outright rather than engage with it. It’s a strawman argument.

   If you are AI-critique curious:

   • Algorithmic Justice League
   • Distributed AI Research Institute
   • Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000
   • We deserve better than an AI-powered future

My AI wishlist for technologists

If you don’t need to use AI, don’t. Do something else. Turn off default settings that include AI. Switch your search engine to DuckDuckGo and turn off AI features. Turn off Apple intelligence. Turn off Google Gemini. Take a harm-reduction approach to your tech use. (FWIW, this is my approach to eating animal food products. I’m not vegan or even completely vegetarian, but I don’t build my food habits around animal products, which reduces how many animal products I consume.)

Don’t make AI your main thing. Charles Eames said, “Never delegate understanding.” Don’t rely on AI alone to make decisions about what’s true, certainly not for core parts of your work.

Understand the bias that ships with your LLM. Do everything you can to critically evaluate outputs for inaccessible, biased or otherwise harmful content. Right-size your models and turn down the “creativity” setting.

Advocate for sustainable, safe AI, including regulation and environmental mitigation measures. Individual choices get us down the road a piece, but what we really need is to mitigate the impacts at a high level.

Engage your discomfort. If someone critiques AI and it makes you uncomfortable, listen to understand and be open to changing your mind. Most of the folks who are warning about the harms of AI are minoritized people - Black and brown women, queer and trans people. Believe them!

Are there any questions you think researchers could help answer regarding trans-inclusive design?

This is an excellent question. Some of the things I’d ask folks to understand include…

What are ways we can design for trust and safety? How can we create digital spaces where people feel safe? What are some of the ways we can foster trustworthiness?

What would trans-informed design look like? How can we use the very concept of transness - boundary-crossing, liminality, non-binary thinking - to expand our thinking about how technologies can be used, and to what ends?

Oliver Haimson is studying this very thing, and his new book Trans Technologies is available for free, open access, from MIT Press.

How might trans-inclusive digital design change IRL service design? We’re already seeing this as part of our work in Civic Tech, moving from automation to true digital transformation. We all know that real-world constraints map to technological design choices. How then do we transform the tech stack and use that to change our very service delivery model?

Jump to: Jargon translator, Transferable skills

Prepare to leave

There are a lot of logistical and emotional components of job-hunting, applying, interviewing, and changing jobs. That part alone is hard, and it’s plenty to have to do. But also prepare yourself for the inevitable grief of leaving your field, as well as the identity shift that happens when you leave.

Resources:

• Finding your purpose after academia - amazing resource from H. Alpert Abrams
• Vocational awe: the lies we tell ourselves By Fobazi Ettarh
• Quit lit: compendium of posts from people who left academia
• Sabbatical by Becca Quon
• What it took to take the leap by Eira Tansey
• Career change resources by Alexis Logsdon
• What it means to leave by me
• https://medium.com/@michellehandy94/from-phd-to-product-my-messy-journey-into-industry-f1046a22a754

What do you want to do?

• What are you good at?
• What do you want to do more of?
• What do you require?
• Do you want a job or a career? How much heart/soul can you put into your work?

Ask yourself if your career actually needs to have a trajectory.

Sometimes it just doesn’t make any sense. What does “career success” look like for you? If it looks like climbing a ladder, you are probably not reading this right now.

It doesn’t have to be a forever-job. It can be a for-now job.

It can be really easy to search for the dream job/company that you’ll stay at forever! Sometimes, though, you just need a job to get you started, to pivot into another field or get you experience doing X, Y, or Z. Don’t stress yourself out looking for a perfect forever job.

Find a job you could do, that pays you enough to live, and that gets you the experience you need.

Resource: former librarian Alexis Logsdon wrote an incredibly helpful series of posts on planning your career transition.

Learn how to tell your story

Before you start applying for jobs, think about how you’d answer the question “tell us about yourself” in 1-2 minutes at the start of an interview. Tie your past work and interests to the thing that you want to do next. That is the story that you will tell your interviewers, your network on LinkedIn, and most importantly yourself as you’re moving through the job hunt process.

Resource: How to tell your story and enter the UX field from Michele L’Heureux

Gather the goods

What artifacts do you have that can help you tell your story?

• Things you’ve written: articles, blog posts, policies, strategy documents, memos, project plans
• Presentations you’ve given
• Projects you’ve initiated, led, or contributed significantly to
• Any other artifacts that represent your work.

Do your research

Use your strong research skills to learn how things work outside of academia.

Do informational interviews

Ask friends and friends of friends for informational interviews. People are so very generous! A quick half-hour call will give you a lot of insight into what a person’s job and workplace is like, what kinds of things they’re responsible for, and even the words they use to talk about what they do. Soak it up.

See what others are doing

Dust off your LinkedIn account. Start searching for people who are talking about things you’re interested in. Follow them, and follow who they follow. You don’t have to “connect” with them if you don’t want; you can just follow their posts.

Look for jobs

By looking at job ads you can learn what types of words/phrases people are using to describe certain skills. Refine your search as you find new keywords in job postings.

All job ads are aspirational. You won’t have 100% of the qualifications for every job. If you have half the qualifications, apply.

Resources:

• An Academic’s Guide to Getting a Non-Academic Job
• https://medium.com/@michellehandy94/from-phd-to-product-my-messy-journey-into-industry-f1046a22a754
• From me: Job-hunting in tech after leaving librarianship

Figure out your system

Dive in. Your process will emerge.

I recommend starting a spreadsheet to track each role you’re interested in, whether you applied, the employer, a link to the job, your application status, when you applied, and any other notes you want to make (salary? concerns?)

Where to look for jobs

• Best places to start: LinkedIn and Indeed
• Nonprofit jobs: Idealist.org
• Higher ed jobs: Chronicle of Higher Ed Jobs; job sites for institutions in your area
• Public sector/government jobs:
  • Job sites for your municipality, state, and usajobs.gov
  • Public sector job board on LinkedIn is a great weekly roundup of tech/UX jobs in governments
• Words of Mouth is a weekly email newsletter with job postings across the arts, digital jobs at nonprofits, etc. Also includes fellowships. This list is really tailored for GLAM/academic-adjacent folks.

LinkedIn is, unfortunately, a thing

LinkedIn is weirdly very important outside of higher ed, especially in the private sector.

• Fill out your profile - add a brief bio (remember your story) and add more details about your responsibilities/accomplishments in previous/current work and volunteer experience.
• Model your profile based on what others are doing - lurk and find folks whose profiles look good to you and note how they are using LinkedIn. Make any changes to your profile that feel authentic for you.
• Make/strengthen connections - reach out to folks in your existing network and add new people that you know. LinkedIn is extremely creepy and knows who you know. Just add ‘em.
• Ask for help - either as a post, or through messaging folks. Most folks are very eager to add connections, exchange messages, share links to jobs, offer referrals, and share information about their work.
• Weak social ties are crucial for finding jobs - so don’t be afraid to reach out to acquaintances on LinkedIn.

Apply

Gird your loins

The job market, especially in UX and adjacent fields in 2024, is awful 🙂. No matter what field you’re in, though, be prepared to be ghosted at any point in the application process. Don’t take it personally.

Transferable skills

Your skills are transferable!

Here are some transferable skills I identified for myself:

• Talking with people and building relationships
• Managing projects and stakeholders
• Recruiting, hiring, retaining, rewarding, and managing people
• Facilitating meetings and workshops, and presenting to groups of all sizes
• Writing for different audiences, including communicating “professionally”
• Mapping out, clarifying, and streamlining workflows
• Strategic planning
• Understanding how technologies connect and how the internet works
• Putting theory into practice for diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility
• Research: survey design, interviews, usability testing, log analysis, data analysis, (light) statistical analysis
• Writing: reports, policies, blog posts, project plans, academic papers
• Instructional design
• Web design, writing for the web, working with legacy processes and systems

Transferable skills for librarians

• Reference/instruction/outreach librarians
  • Complex search strategies, keywords and advanced query construction; bibliographies; information-seeking across multiple complex databases
  • Event management, publicity, and facilitation
  • Curriculum development, instructional design learning assessments, public speaking
  • Digital content development; learning management platforms
  • Working with SMEs (faculty) to create/manage content
• If you’ve used LibGuides, congrats! You have used a content management system with a variety of content types and complex user roles.
  • If you’ve managed LibGuides you have experience with content governance, information architecture, and (likely) web design.
• Data management librarians
  • Any Python, R, data modeling, data governance, or data security work
  • Working with campus partners to help meet federal mandates

Resources:

• Social Sciences & Humanities to UX Research from Amy Santee
• Interview with Pam Drouin, who moved from librarianship to UX

Jargon translator

Here are a few terms that might help in translating your skills for a new context:

ℹ️ I’d really like to expand this section! Please write me with any additions.

Prep your resume

• Great advice from Alison Green on this. Big note: your resume is a marketing document.
• Your resume should be 1-2 pages
• Make it easily skimmable. No big chunks of text. Numbers where possible.
• Where possible, match the language of the job posting with your resume
• Tailor your resume for each job you apply for
• Tailor your cover letter for each job you apply for
• Keep a few different “flavors” of your resume depending on which types of roles you are applying for, then adjust as needed for each application.
• In writing about what you worked on, focus on measurable accomplishments rather than listing duties.
• Each job description should be shorter than the one before
• No need to go back more than 10 years. “Recent work experience” is good!

Interview

Each interview should be a conversation and a learning opportunity, and a way to practice talking about yourself. An interview shouldn’t be an inquisition, and if it feels like one, that may be a sign to pull yourself out of the applicant pool.

Be prepared to go through multiple rounds of interviews spread out over several weeks. Again, prepare to be ghosted at any time.

Answer questions

Have a few stories at the ready: tell us about a conflict, tell us about an initiative you led from start to finish, tell us about managing up, tell us about working with a difficult client. Think about the projects you have worked on.

What stories do you have to tell about working with stakeholders in an organization, navigating competing priorities or compromising?

Ask questions

Ask a LOT of questions. You want to know what you’re getting into, and employers want someone who is curious and motivated.

Depending on the vibe of the interview, you might ask questions after you answer their questions:

“You asked about managing multiple competing priorities. How are priorities set and communicated here? Who would the person in this role work with to establish a good priority order?”

Here are some of my favorite questions to ask hiring teams:

• I see that this is a (new role

  existing role). What does success look like for the person in this role? Why did the person in this role previously move on?

• How will you work with the person in this role? How do you collaborate and what duties would you like to see this person take on?
• What goals and initiatives does your company have around diversity, equity and inclusion? What are some challenges or opportunities? (If they don’t have a good answer for this, it’s a red flag.)
• What are some growing edges for the organization? What are y’all actively trying to improve right now?
• How do y’all support each other in both completing work and making sure you take care of yourselves outside of work? Do folks take their vacations here?
• What questions am I not asking that I should be? What do you wish you’d known before you started work?

Resource: Carter Baxter has shared a comprehensive list of questions to ask potential employers.

References don’t really matter

A lot of places outside of higher ed and nonprofits don’t care about calling your references. Instead of calling references, they will simply make you go through a 4-6 step interview process!

In my experience, places only call to verify your former employment at an organization - not get a character reference.

Hang in there

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about leaving a specialized role in a field that encourages folks to achieve national recognition as an individual scholar, it’s that I’m not actually that special. But what I do have is the wisdom of seeing how institutions work and understanding what makes those gears turn. That knowledge translates very easily across sectors and organizations.

You are going to get there! Keep going.

Change log

• 2025/04/27 Moved to this URL, added change log, updated markdown formatting

After 12 years on Wordpress, I finally moved to a static site generator. I’m writing this post in a Markdown file using Obsidian. More in the colophon.

My goal is to post more often. We’ll see how it goes!

WTF is coffeeneuring?

A cortado at Borealis in Riverside.

A riff on randonneuring, coffeeneuring is, at its core, riding your bike to drink coffee. This year’s challenge was as follows:

Between October 6 through November 18, 2024:

• ride your bike 7 times,
• to at least 6 different places
• at least 2 miles round trip every time
• drink 7 total cups of coffee (or another fall-type beverage),
• and document your coffeeneuring

I’ve done similar challenges in past years:

• 2014 Errandonnee challenge
• 2016 Errandonnee challenge

The rides

Lil’ City Ripper.

1. October 5: over/under long way to a short way home. 12.8 miles on the City Ripper. Out to India point and back to New Harvest coffee for a maple pecan cold brew. Looooots of meandering, wandering, going over and under bridges.
2. October 6: west end winder. 8.5 miles on the Ripper and my first time at Long Live Beerworks. I enjoyed a lil’ taster of their Oktoberfest.
3. October 18: bike to (co)work day. 4 miles on the ebike. Another workday at my coworking space in Olneyville. Enjoyed a large mug of drip coffee during my morning meetings.
4. October 20: idyllic Riverside rambler. 12 miles on the City Ripper. Another stunning Saturday in Rhode Island. I drove to the East Providence parking lot to hopped on the East Bay bike path down to Riverside. Saw a yacht rock cover band playing near the water, stuffed some crab cakes in my face, and enjoyed a cortado on the patio at Borealis cofee.
5. October 26: secret coffee shop visit with Jeremy. 3.6 miles on the City Ripper down to Olneyville. Enjoyed an Americano while catching up with Jeremy and gazing out over the Woonasquatucket River.
6. November 10: Woonasquatucket bike path to Moniker Brewery. 10 miles on the ebike. Took the long way around on the Woony bike path in the waning daylight. Enjoyed a smoked helles and a book.
7. November 18: quick lunchtime jaunt to new coffee place Reprise in the West End. 4.4 miles and a cortado. My first ride as a 40-year old and I felt way too old for this cool new coffee shop crowd. #influencing?

Reflections

1. External pressure motivates me. The weather has been far too mild (thanks, climate change!) and far too dry, which means I would’ve been out on my bike a lot anyway in this unseasonably pleasant weather. But this challenge gave me the extra motivation to leave the house and go for a ride.
2. The Woony abides. Throughout this ride, I really got to see the quick progress being made on the newest part of the Woonasquatucket River Greenway, which is a key component of my route anywhere east of our neighborhood (i.e. most of the city). I am very excited to see this work nearing completion!
3. Riding bikes makes me happy. I did my first errandonnee the year I turned 30. I turned 40 this past week, and lots has changed in 10 years, but this one thing has remained the same. I am feeling grateful to be able to ride, and to have such good infrastructure to make it far more fun.

See you next year.

Progress on the Woony bike path.

My current role is my first job at a digital services company, my first time working on an Agile team, and the first time I haven’t been one of the only experts in the room on web technologies.

The other big differentiator? Scale.

Simply put, the projects my colleagues and I are working on are huge. Within the single government agency I’m serving, there are scores of teams working on complicated tech stacks with tons of dependencies, all in support of millions of users – our fellow citizens.

Here are a few things that I’ve observed in my shift from working within smaller digital ecosystems, to working on large-scale federal digital projects.

UX is a given

Thanks to a lot of heavy lifting by UX advocates, user experience and human-centered design are accepted (and funded) norms, rather than something that has to be fought for. User research is an imperative, and product teams are open to – and even hungry for! – their assumptions being disproven through research.

Accessibility to the front

There is a lot of good accessibility work being done in the civic tech space, specifically an accessibility beyond compliance approach that makes a lot of work in civic tech a model for how accessibility should be done in other industries. Accessibility is baked in from the beginning phases of design and development, rather than being an afterthought, an add-on, or a grudging nod to legal compliance. I’ve learned more about accessibility in the past 9 months than in the previous 9 years. There’s a long way to go, and it’s exciting that accessible, inclusive, trauma-informed design is part of everyone’s work.

We prioritize who we’re designing for

This seems obvious, but for many organizations who are trying to use their websites to do everything for everyone, the idea of designing only for certain users can be a tough sell.

We aren’t designing for agency employees, internal stakeholders or casual external audiences. We’re designing for, and prioritizing the experience of, defined groups of users.

We know our target audience(s), and acknowledge that people are visiting our websites to perform tasks. We measure results based on whether folks can do that. Though business needs show up to some degree in the design, the stuff we’re building optimizes for the user experience and task completion.

There are a lot of us

Our digital teams are cross-functional, meaning that there is some mix of front end coders, back end coders, UX designers and researchers, accessibility specialists, content strategists, and product managers working on each team. Each team is working in support of the larger project, and there are many teams that are here just to support other teams. We are all building the thing as we go. We spend a lot of time talking with other teams about what we’re working on.

Not everybody codes

Not everybody needs to know how to code to do their work well.

Email: LOL

Coming from a workplace that relied primarily (and heavily) on email for communication, it’s been a refreshing change of pace that I can count on two hands the number of emails I’ve sent since starting my job 9 months ago. Everything happens on Slack and GitHub.

This also means that we spend time optimizing processes for the best use of each of these tools. My email muscles may have atrophied, but my GitHub contribution history looks great, I have GitHub-flavored markdown syntax memorized, and I now know more about Slack workflows than most folks.

Work is in the open

All our work is paid for by taxpayers and subject to FOIA. We expect that everything we say is public. Most Slack conversations happen in open channels rather than DMs, and we’re helpfully able to hyperlink to previous conversations in other channels, creating a much more dynamic and interconnected communications ecosystem.

Meetings are focused

After years of attending faculty senate meetings that regularly ran an hour over time, I wrote in my notes the first few weeks at this gig: “People know how to run meetings here.”

If there’s a meeting on my calendar, I know who is running the meeting; what the purpose, agenda, and expected outcomes are; and how documentation will be captured. If we have to meet, we get to the point and we make it snappy. (On the flipside, it also means that we have to work intentionally to build community and rapport.)

I have one job

It has taken some time for me to get used to only having one job. My role is limited in scope, and I remain busy. Coming out of my previous role as a manager, the fact that I’m an individual contributor (IC) with a limited role has been extremely freeing. I’ve spent a lot of time focusing on improving within my practice area, learning from my colleagues, improving operational processes, and supporting my team.

No room for big egos

Everybody here is trying to do a thing to help people (or at very least, do no further harm to people). Working on projects with so many stakeholders and multiple levels of review for most decisions, it’s almost impossible to have a big ego, or hold on too closely to darling ideas, and survive.

Blameless but still accountable

The blameless approach to problem-solving asks: what if we assume that people make mistakes because of a systematic or cultural issue, rather than a personal moral failing?

Agile processes encourage us to reflect on how things are going through regular retrospectives and iterative changes. These processes allow us to identify systemic issues, including failure points, without fear of reprisal – and to still hold our teams accountable for making improvements.

Impact hits different

When working on products that have millions of users, one small change can mean a lot for users – in both good and bad ways. Any time my idea shows up in a final product design, no matter how small, I feel like a million bucks (while also hoping that the change doesn’t have unintended harmful effects for our users).

I also know that sharing my knowledge can result in a ripple effect of changes when other practitioners apply it to their work. When I shared a link to the Trans-inclusive design article I wrote almost five years ago, my coworkers applied the takeaways to the project they’re working on at an entirely different federal agency.

The potential for impact is humbling, and balances out the days when I feel like a tiny cog in a big machine.

Same problems, different scale

As much as things change, they also stay the same. For all the things I’ve seen that have been welcome changes, I’ve also seen stuff that’s been present wherever I’ve worked before:

• Varying adherence to, or buy-in for, standards
• Rushed, band-aid solutions
• Making it up as you go
• Teams working in silos, sometimes on the same problems
• Teams not taking feedback well
• Teams working on the parts but not the whole
• “Put it on the backlog. We’ll get to it later”
• Maintenance as an unsolved mystery
• Upgrades breaking stuff
• Legacy technologies secretly holding crucial components together
• Inconsistencies grudgingly accepted as a path to progress
• HIPPOs pushing through bad/precious solutions
• Weird workarounds for weirder constraints
• Constant change and turnover
• Competing priorities
• Growing pains
• Scope creep
• Failure!

The people, though.

One thing I say often is that technology is people – and civic tech as a field tends to attract folks who care very deeply about outcomes for our very human users. I have yet to meet someone who is hesitant to share ideas, give advice, or otherwise help when needed, and I have learned so very much.

This post is a follow-up: supporting my wife as she exited a harmful work situation, moving nine states away, changing careers, and finding professional footing again after a long run in higher ed and academic libraries.

What happened after I wrote that post

I stayed six more years at my job. During that time:

• I was promoted from line librarian to department head and did some great work that I was proud of.
• I married a fellow academic at my institution. Cue the two-body problem.
• COVID hit and, like many folks, I reassessed my career.
• Meanwhile, my wife’s working conditions became untenable.
• She went on the market and got a great job offer.
• We moved nine states away.
• I left my job and changed career fields twice in two years.

We made our move in 2022, and it has taken me almost two years to write this post. Writing it has been healing. It’s still not where I want it to be, but I need to just publish it so I can write about other things.

Giving myself permission to go

How did this happen? Things moved slowly ‘til they didn’t.

The COVID career reassessment

Our rapid shift to work-from-home during COVID made me realize not only that I could work from home, but that I loved it. Remote work gave me more separation between work and my personal life, not less. At the end of each day, I’d sign off work, close my laptop, and walk immediately into the kitchen to make dinner. During a time of unceasing chaos in the world, I had the immense privilege of this centering routine. It’s something I still cherish being able to do.

Go high, go deep, or get out

In the midst of intersecting global crises, a pandemic and an insurrection, I also increasingly struggled to feel that the work I was doing every day mattered. I didn’t want to climb the ladder any further, and I knew that if I wanted to leave my specialized field, it needed to happen soon.

In my post eight years ago, I wrote about a friend telling me I could “go high or go deep” in my career. Over time, I realized there was a third option: to just go.

Letting go of the idea of a career arc

I started to do research. I met with generous friends and friends-of-friends who had been working in the private sector for years. I learned the language that people used to describe their work, and how they framed problems they were trying to solve. It sounded interesting and not totally dissimilar from my experience.

I slowly began to detach myself from the idea that my career needed to go in a straight line. I gave myself permission to go, and to try something new.

The two-body problem

While I was exploring my exit from academia, my wife’s working conditions at our university continued to deteriorate, even and especially after she got tenure. Though my situation in the library was better, her experience affected me, too. It had real consequences for both of our health and well-being. I also felt disappointed and frustrated with the institution for overworking, ignoring, and ultimately turning its back on my wife.

By the time my wife got her new job offer, we’d both gotten our heads where they needed to be for us to move on. It was time to go.

Making the move

Things really fell into place once we decided to go, which made the transition a lot easier. Within a month, we sold a house, bought a house, and I got a fully remote job at a small consultancy (based partly on the connections I’d made at my library job). Moving is hard enough; we were lucky that it went as smoothly as it could have.

The hardest thing was leaving our people

The featured image for this post is a photo of our dear neighbors gathering early in the morning of our moving day to hug us and send us on our way.

Almost two years later, saying goodbye is still the part that physically aches to think about. Leaving our jobs was relatively easy; leaving the home we’d created and our web of love and support – friends, neighbors, and colleagues – hurt the most. My wife and I had collectively spent 21 years creating our community in Richmond. It was heartbreaking to go.

The second hardest thing was the identity crisis

Skip forward to the move. My wife and I were navigating big changes together: new part of the country, new city, new home, new jobs. Along with all of these big changes came some seismic identity shifts for me as I stepped into a new workplace.

For years prior, I told myself I had a distinct identity separate from my career in libraries, and to some degree, I did. But my professional identity crisis after leaving higher ed was still intense and painful.

Finding legibility

Academic librarianship was such a tidy professional identity for me. I’d established myself in my field, was a respected leader at my institution, and was confident in my work. My wife was an academic, too. Many of our friends worked at the university where we worked. All of it fit so neatly together before. Now that I wasn’t in libraries or in higher ed, what was I?

Changing career fields, I struggled to find a new way to relate to my professional identity and tell my story in a way that was legible not only to others, but to me.

This took a long time and is still a work in progress. But it was a potent and necessary reminder that I needed to embrace that I am a person who exists outside of the work I do.

Releasing the expectations

Despite the professional identity crisis, I also felt a deep sense of relief when I was able to release the expectations I didn’t even know I was holding for myself.

I stopped worrying (or even thinking) about many of the things I had found extremely important when I was working in libraries. I felt guilty, but when I could viscerally sense the tension releasing in my body, the guilt turned to relief. I exhaled. I imagine this is what it’s like for many people when they retire.

New to the job, but not new to work

Starting a new job in an entirely new field after 13 years at the same employer was scary. I wasn’t entirely sure I had the experience to do the job well, and was worried that I was stuck in my ways. By the end of the first week, though, I saw obvious areas where I could plug in and realized I brought lots of skills along with me.

Transferable skills

Many folks who have left libraries and higher ed have talked about transferable skills. Some, in particular, that I carried with me into the private sector:

• Talking with people and building relationships
• Managing projects and stakeholders
• Recruiting, hiring, retaining, rewarding, and managing people
• Facilitating meetings and workshops, and presenting to groups of all sizes
• Writing for different audiences, including communicating “professionally”
• Mapping out, clarifying, and streamlining workflows
• Strategic planning
• Understanding how technologies connect and how the internet works
• Putting theory into practice for diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility
• Instructional design, web design, writing for the web, working with legacy processes and systems, data analysis, research, and so much more.

Same shit, different context

The biggest transferable skill I brought with me, though, was perspective.

I spent the first part of my career learning how to navigate ambiguity, see the forest as well as the trees, build relationships, and create good work I was proud of. Entering new workspaces, I realized I’d learned how to read patterns, relationships, power structures, issues and assets in a much different way, and to identify what was going on at an organizational level. No matter where I went, I had the maturity and x-ray vision of someone who’d seen things. I also had a much stronger sense of where I wanted my boundaries to be, and I stuck to ’em.

Knowing myself

After well over a decade of working full time, I also felt at ease about who I was, what I did and didn’t bring, and where I needed to grow. I wasn’t afraid to say “I don’t know.” Though I was apprehensive about starting something new, I was less self-conscious than I was when I first entered the professional world. I very much owned my mid-career status, rather than feeling like a total newbie.

And because all my coworkers were new to me, not folks I had worked with since I was 24, they didn’t see me as a newbie, either.

Beginner’s brain

My new company’s culture was extremely welcoming for newcomers, and I felt supported to be completely honest about how this was a big transition and a learning curve for me.

Rather than seeing me just as someone who needed to be brought up to speed, my new coworkers saw my newness as a value-add. They asked what I thought as someone with fresh eyes on the business, and we ended up implementing several changes early on based on my ideas.

It also felt refreshing to be very new at something, to feel that uncertainty again for the first time in a while, and to remind myself that this was something I was capable of handling.

I also relished learning about how businesses work, which would help me later on when (much to my own surprise) I started my own business. I felt new synapses firing.

The second quarter of my career

Early on at my new job, a coworker explained her move to our company as “the way I wanted to spend the last quarter of my career.” My coworker had carefully chosen where she wanted to spend her last few years in the workforce. She wasn’t putting pressure on herself to follow a certain career progression.

Thinking of work-life as a series of strategic moves, rather than a graph going forever up, resonated with me. Thanks to my new colleague I had words for what was happening. I was starting the second quarter of my career.

A final note on leaving academia

Anyway, all I ever meant by “the institution cannot love you” was this: whether the institution makes you feel great or horrible, it isn’t about you. Institutions aren’t choosing NOT to love you. They are choosing to reproduce themselves.

Tressie McMillan Cottom

Many smart folks have written about leaving academia. Academic and cultural heritage institutions anywhere are going to do one thing for certain: self-perpetuate at all costs. “Institutions gonna institution” is a common refrain at our house.

The more I moved into leadership positions at my previous institution, the pricklier I felt about maxims like “the institution cannot love you”, because it felt personal. But it’s not personal. Academic and cultural heritage institutions thrive when employees believe these falsehoods:

• This work is a vocation, a calling – not just a job.
• You are your work. Your work is you.
• You can’t be useful in any other field.
• Overwork is a virtue. (And often, a requirement.)
• If you do a good job, the reward is more work.
• A vacancy is no excuse not to do the work.
• If you don’t do it, no one will.
• You can always do more with less.
• You’ll need an outside offer if you dare to ask for a raise.
• If you just follow the right administrative process, justice will be served.
• The institution cares about you and will protect you.

My wife’s situation brought a lot of this into sharp focus for me. I realized that, especially as a middle manager, I had believed and perpetuated many of these myths for years. Leaving academia helped me see this all more clearly and learn what’s important for me.

My departure from academia made space for my wife to heal, too. Though she’s still in higher ed, her workplace is unionized, and she has far more protections than before. And because I’ve got a foot planted firmly outside of academia, we are both a little more more grounded, hopeful and happy.

This story is to be continued. Maybe there’ll be another update in 2032. Stay tuned.

Resources

For folks sticking around to fight the good fight in higher ed: the United Campus Workers Union continues to grow its power.

I’ve started, and continue to update, a guide to getting a job outside of academia, in part because so many folks have reached out for advice. Perhaps you’ll find it useful too.

Some related posts from former cultural heritage workers that have helped me a lot:

• Sabbatical by Becca Quon
• What it took to take the leap by Eira Tansey
• Finding your purpose by Hannah Alpert-Abrams

Thank you for reading.