I have been at the same institution for twelve years, and I am going to be leaving it. I have found myself thinking about what actually remains when someone does this job for that long.
The honest answer is that almost none of it is visible.
There is no plaque on a wiring closet. Nobody walks past a virtualization cluster and thinks about the weekend it took to migrate. The single sign-on that a student uses without noticing, forty times a semester, without once considering that it could have been forty separate logins, represents months of somebody's life. That is the deal in this line of work. You succeed by producing an absence. When the thing you built is working, the correct experience of it is no experience at all.
I made peace with that a long time ago, or told myself I had. It turns out to be a different proposition when you are leaving. Everything I built here will keep running without any indication that a specific person built it, and eventually without anyone who remembers that it needed building. In a few years the systems will be somebody else's to maintain, and then somebody else's to replace, and the replacement will be described as long overdue by people who never saw what came before it. This is the normal life cycle of infrastructure and I have been on the other side of it, saying the same thing about someone else's work, more than once.
What I did not expect is how much of what I will actually miss has nothing to do with any of that.
Small institutions have a texture that larger ones do not. You know the name of the person in accounts payable. You know which faculty member will call you directly rather than open a ticket, and you take the call, because it is faster and because you like them. You are at commencement, standing off to the side, watching students walk across a stage while some part of your brain monitors whether the livestream is holding. You know the building well enough to know which door sticks in humidity.
There is a particular kind of relationship that forms in a place where everyone is slightly under-resourced and the work still has to happen. Friendship is the wrong word for it, though it more often than not becomes that. What it actually is: the trust that accumulates between people who have been in enough difficult rooms together to know how the other one behaves when things go wrong. I have that with a handful of people here. Some of them are in offices I will not walk past anymore after this. That is the part I keep circling back to.
I have also managed a lot of people over these years. A few of them are doing things now that I could not have done at their age, in roles more senior than mine was at that point, and the honest accounting of my contribution to that is that I gave them room and got out of the way at roughly the right moments. Whether that counts as mentorship or just as not interfering is a question I cannot answer. I hope some of what they carry forward is something they picked up here. I will probably never know which parts, or if they were positive or negative experiences.
There is a version of leaving that requires you to decide the place was bad in order to justify going, and I do not believe this is one of them.
The last stretch here has been hard. Some of the reasons I am leaving are real, and specific, and I am not going to write about them, because it would be unprofessional and because they are a small fraction of twelve years. What I can say is that the difficulty at the end did not retroactively convert the rest into something it was not. The good years were good. Really good. The work mattered. The people were people I was glad to work alongside.
Both things stay true at the same time, and I have found that holding them together requires more effort than picking one. The narrative pressure runs toward simplification. Either you loved it and are heartbroken, or it was untenable and you escaped. Neither of those is what this is. What this is: a long stretch of work I am mostly proud of, at a place I mostly liked, ending for reasons that are sound, with a fair amount of grief attached that I did not fully anticipate.
Something that has surprised me is how physical the wistfulness has become as the timeline has compressed. I notice myself paying attention to things I stopped seeing years ago. The particular quality of light in a hallway in late afternoon. A conversation with someone in a stairwell that I would have described as routine six months ago and now file away deliberately.
I do not think this is unique to me or to this institution. It is probably just what happens when you know the count is finite. You start to see the place again the way you saw it when you first arrived, before it became the background against which everything else happened.
There is an irony in doing that now, after the decision is made. The version of me that could have benefited from paying this kind of attention was the one working here five years ago, taking all of it as permanent.
I still have work to do here, and I intend to do it well until the day I do not work here anymore. That matters to me for reasons that are partly about the institution and partly about who I want to be on the way out. The last few months of a tenure are one of the more honest tests of a person's professional character, and I would rather pass it than not.
But I have started to think about the shape of the thing as a whole, which is what you do when you can see the end of it. Twelve years is a long time to give to one place. It was not wasted. The systems will outlive my memory of building them, the people will move on to things I will hear about secondhand if at all, and the institution will continue in a form that includes some choices I made and will eventually include none of them.
That is what the job is. You put the work into the walls and then you walk out of the building.
— Chris