It’s official: this week I submitted a formal letter of resignation to my manager, and signed and sent an acceptance letter to my new employer. After what’s been a mostly-good five-year stint at NVIDIA, I’ll be leaving at the end of the month to start a new job at VMWare. Though things are still plenty busy over at NVIDIA and I’m still excited about many of the ongoing projects there, I felt that the time had come for me to move on, explore a different career option, work in a totally different part of the industry, try to stay flexible… As I’ve pointed out to many, I’ve never done the same thing or lived in the same place for more than five years at any point in my life, and I think having gotten used to that I was becoming increasingly restless.

When I started at NVIDIA I was just out of university, very gung-ho about work, overflowing with enthusiasm… five years later I find myself a bit jaded, somewhat cynical and ever so slightly bitter. Why? Overall I’m proud of what I accomplished and happy with the work I did, but to some extent the past five years seem somewhat like wasted time to me: sure, I did good work, made quite a bit of money in the process, but in many ways I’m left feeling… hollow, maybe… for having largely neglected other aspects of my life. My latest efforts have not only been about changing my career path, but more importantly “rebalancing” my life. I still have a long ways to go before I find that balance…