My Year's End, My Millennium's End

Tonight will be my last post for 2006. The holiday week is a good time to clear one's head and focus on family and fun. Thank you all for taking a gander at this new blog -- it's been fun & I look forward to continuing. I have a bunch of topics scribbled down & a few dozen bookmarks of interesting papers.

Today was also my final day at Millennium. I am on the payroll through the end of the year, severance for a while next year, and various confidentiality agreements to my grave. But for me, this was the end. I turned in all my trappings -- laptop, badge, security token, sent a farewell message, and took my last box out.

For ten years, Millennium has been a constant in my life, yet nothing has been constant at Millennium. Eight desks, six bosses (one twice), uncountable reorganizations (and bosses' bosses), a multitude of department/group names -- I once joked that the company portal should have a banner "Today is Monday & you report to XXX in department YYY" so you could keep track of it. Two CEOs, 5 CFOs (I think), 3 big mergers (defined as changing my daily life!), four big 'restructurings'' -- one could invent dozens more measurs for how MLNM exemplified creative destruction.

As one might expect, that meant a lot different people. By my guess, somewhere between 5-10% of people who worked for Millennium the day I started will still be there after I leave. One back-of-the-envelope estimate is about 3K people who can claim to Millennium alumni, with perhaps close to 2K who were in Discovery at some point.

It's been an amazing experience & quite an education. I will miss it, and it seems a lot to hope that the next career waystation can match that. Fare-thee-well Millennium.