You cannot get that from five years. You cannot get it from ten. You get it from the full length of the thing, including the years when the thing is not fully working.
What I wish is not that I had left sooner. What I wish is that I had said, sooner, that the arrangement was not the arrangement I thought it was and that I needed it to be the one I thought it was or I was going to find a different one. I wish I had pushed when Victor said we would work it out and demanded a specific answer. I wish I had negotiated my salary in the years when I had the leverage of being the person doing the work.
These are not regrets in the catastrophic sense. They are lessons in the difference between the arrangement you assume and the arrangement you negotiate, and in how long you can operate on assumption before the assumption fails.
I am operating now on negotiation. Written, compensated, bounded, specific.
Owen and I had a disagreement in my second month about a protocol implementation timeline. He thought my proposal was too aggressive. I thought the slower option created an unnecessary gap. We had the conversation directly, with reasons on both sides, and modified the approach. The modification was better than either original position.
I noted this, because it is the thing I had wanted and not fully had for eighteen years: a professional relationship where disagreement is a conversation rather than something someone is assigned to smooth over.
The work is hard in the ordinary ways that good work is hard. There is more to build than there is time to build it perfectly. There are coordinators developing who require investment I give gladly because that is the job of a senior person in a team. There are clients with requirements and carriers with constraints and the space between these two things is where the job lives.
I have always lived in that space.
The difference is that now the space is mine.