The Tuesday I Deleted My CV

On Tuesday, April 14th, 2026, I deleted my CV from my Dropbox. I had been keeping it there, in a folder called _safety_net, since I started my current job in early 2020. Every six months or so I would open it, update the current role bullet points, and put it back. The ritual was small. The ritual was, I think now, doing a particular kind of psychological work, and I want to write about why I have decided to stop doing it.

I am thirty-six. I have been a Site Reliability Engineer for eleven years. By the median tenure of our industry — which, as of the last Stack Overflow survey I looked at, is somewhere around 2.3 years per company — I am an outlier in two directions. I have stayed at my current job for six years, which is roughly three median tenures. And I have been in SRE specifically, as a discipline, for nearly its entire existence as a named thing. The first time I put site reliability engineer on a job application, the recruiter on the other end asked me what it meant.

The decision to delete the CV was not a single moment. It was the slow, accumulating sense that I had been treating my career as a series of escape hatches when, in fact, my career was the slow accumulation of being the person who was still there.

What job-hopping bought me, and what it didn't

I am not going to pretend that the conventional wisdom is wrong. Between 2013 and 2019, I changed companies three times, and each move came with a meaningful raise — the kind of raise that, as anyone in our industry knows, you basically cannot get by staying. The pay arithmetic of the tech labour market still rewards mobility over loyalty, and to pretend otherwise to a younger reader would be to lie to them. I am not going to lie to them.

But the things I am proudest of in my career — the few things I would point to if a young engineer asked me what have you actually built, Anya? — none of them came from a job I held for less than three years. Every one of them required me to be present long enough to see the second-order consequences of my own decisions. The migration I championed in year two that turned out to be a mistake in year four, and the patient work of unwinding it in year five, and the better migration that we did in year six precisely because I had been forced to live with the consequences of the first one. The runbook I wrote in year one that I had to rewrite in year three because the system had drifted past it, and which I am about to rewrite again in year six, because the system has drifted further.

There is a category of engineering wisdom that is only available to the person who is still there when their own past decisions come due. It is not available to the brilliant new hire. It is not available to the consultant. It is not available to the person who left in year two with a great LinkedIn post. It is, in fact, only available to the person who stayed, and who has the slightly haunted look of someone who has had to apologise to their own past self in code review.

I would like to say more about this haunted look. I think it is undervalued.

The engineer-shaped hole

There is a hole in our industry's talent market, and it is the shape of the engineer who has been at one place for eight to twelve years. Every team I have ever worked on, including very good ones, has needed exactly one of them and has had, at most, zero of them. The eight-to-twelve-year engineer is the person who remembers why the auth gateway was named what it was named, which now-departed VP killed the previous attempt at unifying it, and which obscure compliance regulation from 2017 is the reason the audit log has a field nobody else can explain. They are the person who, in a planning meeting, says we tried that in 2019 and here is what specifically didn't work, and who is, in that moment, doing the work of three architects and a historian.

Our industry has set up its compensation and prestige systems in a way that makes it almost impossible for this person to exist. The salary curve flattens after year five. The promotion track requires you to show ownership of new initiatives, which is industry-speak for do not get caught maintaining the old ones. The conference circuit rewards the engineer who can speak in confident generalities, not the engineer who can tell you exactly which 2018 design decision is the reason a particular service times out at the ninetieth percentile every Tuesday evening.

I am not arguing that everyone should stay. I am arguing that the people who do stay are doing a category of work that we have, collectively, decided not to value, and that we are paying for the gap they leave when they go in ways we do not measure.

The CV in the Dropbox

So why did I keep the CV updated for six years?

I have been thinking about this for two weeks. The honest answer is that the CV was a kind of option, in the financial sense. The presence of the document — the fact that I could, on any given Tuesday, decide to leave — was the thing that made me feel like the decision to stay was an active one. Without the CV, I would have been trapped. With the CV, I was choosing.

The trouble is that I have realised, slowly, that the option was costing me something. Every time I opened the document, every time I read the bullet points and asked myself is this still good enough to take to a recruiter?, I was performing a small ritual of detachment from the work I was actually doing. I was, in those ten minutes every six months, treating my real job as something I was about to leave. And I think — though I cannot prove this — that the residue of those ten minutes was leaking into the other 999 hours of my work life. I was, at some low level, always a little bit packed.

I do not know if this is generalisable. Maybe other people can hold the CV in the back drawer without it doing this to them. But for me, the document was no longer a safety net. It was a small, recurring reminder that I was somewhere I had not fully agreed to be.

What I am trying instead

I have not, despite the title of this piece, made a vow. I have not promised myself or anyone else that I will stay at this company forever. I am thirty-six, the market is what it is, and I have learned enough about my own self-deception to not bet on declarations.

What I have done is delete the document and replace it with a different one, in the same folder, called _what_I_am_building. It is a list, updated quarterly, of the things I am specifically trying to build at this job — not the bullet points I would put on a CV, but the things I would miss being part of if I left. The current list has nine items on it. Some of them are projects. Some of them are people I am mentoring. Some of them are quiet cultural changes I am trying to make and that, in some cases, will only land in year nine or year ten.

The discipline of writing the list is doing something different from the discipline of updating the CV. The CV was a list of what I have proven. The new list is a list of what I am invested in. The first orients you toward your past. The second orients you toward your future. I do not think I would have known to make this distinction at twenty-six. I am writing it down because I think it might have saved twenty-six-year-old me some grief.

If you are in your twenties, in this industry, please do not read this as advice to stay where you are. Move. Move often. Get the raises. Build a network. Discover what kind of engineer you actually want to be by being a few different kinds of engineer. Everything I have said about the value of staying becomes nonsense if applied too early.

But if you are in your thirties, and you have been somewhere for four or five years, and the only reason you keep the CV updated is the small psychological comfort of feeling like you could leave — I would, gently, suggest considering whether the comfort is costing you the work you came to do.

The work, in this industry, takes years. The years can only be given by someone who has decided to be present for them.

Next Tuesday: an essay on the strange grief of finishing a multi-year migration. I have been carrying it around since March. Until then, look at what is in your safety net folder, and ask what it has been quietly telling you about how you feel about your work.