Instead of giving advice, I’m going to talk about how it was for me doing the same, switching after 13 years at my first employer. There was a lot more learnin

Instead of giving advice, I’m going to talk about how it was for me doing the same, switching after 13 years at my first employer. There was a lot more learning at the new job than I initially thought. Much of the knowledge was domain-specific, which I hadn’t realized there would be so much of (and also how a lot of my existing knowledge proved unique to my previous employer), but much was also in technologies I just hadn’t worked with before. The first year was a good lesson in humility. Also that first year, I felt … lost. In the old organization I was the goto guy for lots of questions, and in the new organization things happened around me but often didn’t involve me, and I struggled to get traction on those projects around me even when I knew I could be useful. Similarly having influence on the decision-making took a while. At the old place my opinion carried weight with all the right people. At the new place I had no reputation and no connections, and my opinion was heard but initially carried little weight. I had to build up some social credit first to have that kind of say. Also, the way decisions were made was completely different, and it took over a year until I understood how to influence them and I started getting real agency over my work. Finally, at first it was quite lonely. I knew it was important to get to know a lot of people so I tried to have a lot of different contacts and kept a list of names (because I’m terrible with them), but even though everyone was very nice to me I didn’t feel a real bond with them until after a while, and I missed the coworkers from my old job during that time. Forming a bond with my new coworkers ultimately happened through the projects I was doing with them.