This is what people see on work zoom calls when I have my camera off (which would be every zoom call if it were up to me); a professional headshot taken a couple years after I joined the AML IT team at Raymond James, and the same day I received the service award, given to me by then CEO Paul Reilly and RJ founder Tom James.
Despite appearances such as this, I’ve always had an uneasy relationship with my corporate career in Information Technology. With only English degrees and thinking I’d end up being a professor or working for some sort of non-profit, Corporate America is not at all where I expected to find myself and certainly not where I thought I’d stay all these years (by April of 2028 it will have been 30 years!).
And yet, I felt I had come to some sort of peace with it, upon joining RJ in March of 2015 and then shortly after when I finally quit drinking (it amazes me that this is almost 10 years ago now!). By staying sober for more than a few weeks or a month at a time, I learned that a large part of hating my job was due to the way my active alcoholism sort of poisoned my entire life.
It seems pretty obvious I know, but what can I say, I’m a slower learner? I could only fully realize this truth for myself by finally doing what I had needed to do for years. I feel like I got sober just in time.
I settled into my role on the IT team for one of the most interesting business areas I’d ever worked in before - Anti-Money Laundering and Financial Crime Management. It felt like we were doing something with a higher purpose than just to make the firm money, we were fighting the bad guys! And the focus on patterns in data deemed “suspicious” signifying something nefarious might be going on, and systems used to detect and investigate such situations I also found more interesting than systems at my other jobs.
I became a Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialist and as a Senior, then Lead Business Analyst, I gained the trust and respect of our business partners; not every day was perfect but I was doing interesting work and getting paid well to do it. Life was good!
Fast forward about 8 years when an opportunity came for me to step into management last Fall and I took it. I had some fear that it was going to be way more work and responsibility for not that much more money and well - turns out I was right!
So, after giving it about a year, I’m going to soon transition back to being just “Lead BA” and also moving to another team. I’m making this move to escape a manager I wasn’t wild about reporting to and also the feelings of being sunk and despairing at systems that require so much hand-holding and no resources to truly fix them. Always being asked to do too much with too little and under ridiculous timelines.
I just don’t want to do it anymore and I actually sort of felt like I would simply leave the firm if they didn’t let me leave the team. Fortunately, RJ is really good about letting employees have some control over their own careers and allowing moves like this one I’m making.
I feel so much relief thinking about leaving those particular system problems behind and getting a fresh start with a new team, that I know it’s the right decision. Of course there will be new problems with the new team, new projects and less than perfect systems that I will have to learn from scratch.
But at least they will be new! Sometimes all we want is have something new in our lives. And I’m actually really proud of myself, because I was pretty miserable and I did something about it. I decided not to suffer in silence, I chose to have the uncomfortable conversations that were part of making this change, and I’ll weather any further discomfort of final weeks as manager until they let me make the transition to the new team and back to the BA role. It will all be worth it!
