Five year plans

I've just done a training session. It was pretty good. The instructor made one point that was interesting. He felt that making a personal where will you be in 5 years plan was pretty pointless.

Thinking about it he's basically right. There's no way to project what will happen that far out and things we have no control over.

I thought back 5 years to September 2011. At that time I was with an UCCDI team as part of the blackberry platform group. The platform was about 1200 people total. since then this is stuff that happened that would have blown any 5 year plan out of the water

One day in fall 2011 we came to work and platform had been dissolved and UCCDI was no more.

Sorry after UCCDI was assigned to some existing team called Devops. It was quite a different culture and I was a misfit on that team despite working extremely long hours during the BB10 death march.

Luckily I escaped Devops and was able to switch to BlackBerry ID server at the end of 2012. That was a pretty good run with bbid server.

By the end of 2013 the Halifax bbid server team was attritioned down from 5 people to 2 and the team was dissolved. Me and the other Halifax guy were assiged as lone remote members to Ottawa sprint teams. In June 2014 there was another reorg and I was laid off from rim. That sure wasn't in the 2011 plan.

Luckily, shortly after rim ended I caught on at CGI and had a successful year and a half run there. Nearshore offshoring for a global European investment bank. It was good to be a senior again and have some status and actually write features.

Then late 2015 I caught on at ResMed where I am finishing up my first year. I also switched from Java to .net. I hope this can continue long enough to review what actually happened in the next 4 years here. It's good here.

Still to my point. from September 2011 to now a number of major things happened any of which would have blown out any 5 year plan. The same is true of a 2006 plan at SupportSoft when the future was to leave for RIM. A 2001 5 year plan at PRIOR could not have accounted for the xwave takeover, going to Core, the SupportSoft takeover of Core Networks.


So I agree in tech 5 years is too long and too much will happen. You just have to be able to adjust and deal with and advance yourself in whatever will unfold.