grill me on Zoom for an hour or so between meetings on a work day. It's a good conversation; they ask good questions. After, they ask me to draft a document sketching the organization of a new Office of Justice Data.
I submit; another few weeks pass. They tell me I didn’t get the job, but they want to connect me with the incoming CDO to interview for the #2 position. I interview, I get the offer. I have endless conversations with Shin-Yi; I follow up incessantly on major points of strategy and minor points of logistics; I ruin my June vacation thinking about this. Gurbir Grewal steps down to work for the SEC, and his successor takes over, which means I've now had face time with the Attorney General of New Jersey.
I’m fully vaccinated at this point and beginning to come back to the office. Possibly related to this, I’m starting to feel, for the first time, almost good at my job. I understand our stakeholders, I’m secure in my relationships with my management chain, I have my head around a lot of our planning and product strategy and data processing, I have good relationships with my people, my role’s changed to focus less on support for fixed income index providers and more on internal ETL and data analysis work. There’s no more performance management. There are still hard things and things I don’t like, but it’s gotten so much better. With this move to government I’m looking at a pay cut in the range of 25%.
But I keep coming back to: best-in-class support for equity and fixed income portfolio managers versus law enforcement reform in the age of George Floyd. I keep coming back to the org structure I drafted in that fevered 72 hours after the interview; to a culture and operation I can help build from the ground up, can infuse with the expertise and service mindset and esprit de corps that I've always .
I keep coming back to: I want something more than restless mornings.
Terrified that this vision of a mission-driven future is nothing but a fever dream, I say yes.
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