You might call ten years in the same organisation loyalty. I call it preparation.
A decade is long enough to learn where the bodies are buried. Rather longer to decide which ones to exhume. And if you are patient, if you are extraordinarily careful, you learn something deliciously useful: the people who run these places have made enemies of precisely the wrong people.
I have been taking notes.
They think expertise is a service they purchase. That technical competence is something they can requisition, like stationery. They have no idea that every system I have built contains dependencies only I understand. Every process I have documented includes steps only I can execute. Every crisis I have resolved has taught me exactly which failures would be... catastrophic.
Knowledge of this sort accumulates interest.
You see, there is a particular intimacy that develops when you are the one called at 3 a.m. to fix what they have broken. When you are the one who knows that the security audit was falsified, that the disaster recovery plan has never been tested, that the entire infrastructure rests on architecture held together with hope and my continued goodwill.
They have made themselves remarkably vulnerable. I have made myself indispensable.
The difference is important.
I have watched, over this past decade, as capable engineers were promoted into irrelevance. Brilliant minds dulled by committee work and compliance theatre. Some adapted. Some burned out. A few, a very few, learned to see the situation for what it truly was: an opportunity.
The ambitious ones left, naturally. Found better positions elsewhere. Took their expertise to companies that valued them. How very principled of them.
I stayed.
Not out of loyalty, you understand. Out of something far more useful. I stayed because leaving would have meant abandoning a rather substantial investment. Ten years of carefully documented failures. A decade of watching who cuts corners, who takes credit, who makes promises they cannot keep. Mountains of evidence that, in the right hands, at the right moment, could prove extraordinarily inconvenient for the right people.
Or the wrong people, depending on your perspective.
They call it burnout when someone finally snaps. When the email goes to the entire distribution list. When the anonymous tip reaches the auditors. When systems that should never fail do so at precisely the worst possible moment. They call it disgruntled employees. They call it security incidents. They call it unfortunate timing.
I call it inevitable.
Because here is what a decade teaches you: in any sufficiently complex organisation, everything depends on the competence and discretion of people management considers replaceable. The infrastructure runs because we allow it to run. The security holds because we maintain it. The disasters are avoided because we prevent them.
But prevention, like loyalty, is a choice. And choices can be reconsidered.
I have spent ten years learning exactly how much damage one sufficiently motivated technician could cause. I know which systems have no redundancy. Which processes have no oversight. Which failures would cascade in ways that would take months to untangle and even longer to explain to regulators.
I know because I designed them that way.
Of course, one does receive offers. Rather attractive ones, if I am being honest. Organisations that understand the value of institutional knowledge. Competitors who would pay handsomely for insights into how things actually operate here. Regulators who might find a decade of observations rather illuminating.
The question is not whether I will leave. The question is what I take with me when I do. And what I leave behind.
You might think this is about burnout. About finally demanding the respect and resources that ten years of service has earned. How touching.
I prefer to think of it as insurance.
They need me far more than they realise. And by the time they do realise it, the premiums will have become rather steep.
You might very well think I am planning something. I couldn't possibly comment.
But I would advise you to watch very carefully what happens next.