EngineerHer

I want to tell you about a commute.

It was over eighty minutes each way. On a good day. In a country where the roads are not known for their predictability and the weather is not known for its cooperation. Not to mention the regular delays due to sheep or cattle on the road.

I took that role anyway. Deliberately. Knowingly. With full awareness that the commute was not sustainable and that I had no clear plan for how to make it work long term.

I took it because I needed to get out.

The manager I ran from

I’ve written about this period before. The manager who nit-picked everything. Who changed his focus from one day to the next. Who sent reports back covered in corrections that weren’t about accuracy – they were about anxiety. His anxiety, expressed through my work.

What I haven’t written about yet is what it did to me day to day.

I was crying before work. During work. After work. The kind of crying that isn’t about a specific thing – it’s about the accumulated weight of going somewhere every day that is taking something from you and not giving anything back. The kind that arrives without warning and takes you by surprise even when you know, rationally, that it’s coming.

I had this overwhelming, physical urge to get out. Not to go somewhere specific. Just to not be there anymore.

And so when a role came up – any role, essentially – I took it. The commute was not something I was able to negotiate with myself about at that point. The distance between me and that building was the only thing that mattered.

I spent months trying to make it work. Looking at housing closer to the site. Trying to figure out a way to manage the hours around the driving. Trying to factor in my husband, who also had a life and a job and a reasonable expectation that we would continue to live in the same place.

It didn’t work. It was never going to work. I had run so hard and so fast that I hadn’t stopped to check where I was running to.

Five years later

It took five years. Five years of other roles, other moves, other decisions – some better than others – before I got a phone call that changed things.

A recruiter rang. And the first question I asked – before the salary, before the title, before the responsibilities, before anything else that any sensible person would lead with – was: what’s the Eircode?

People laugh when I tell that story. Forty-three minutes. After eighty-plus each way, forty-three minutes felt like winning the lottery.

But here’s what that question was really about. By that point I knew something I hadn’t known when I took the unsustainable commute. I knew what I actually needed. Not just what I needed to escape – what I needed to move toward. The commute wasn’t just a preference. It was a non-negotiable. It was something I had learned, the hard way, that I could not function without.

That’s the difference between running from and running to. When you’re running from, you’re optimising for distance from the bad thing. When you’re running to, you’re optimising for proximity to the right thing. And those two decisions look completely different – in the moment and in where they land you.

How to tell which one you’re doing

I’m not going to tell you that running from is always wrong. Sometimes you need to get out. Sometimes the situation is genuinely damaging you and the most important thing is to stop the bleeding, even if the dressing isn’t perfect. I ran from that manager and I don’t regret it – I needed to leave, and staying would have cost me more than the unsustainable commute did.

But I made that move without clarity. And making a move without clarity means you’re making it with whatever is loudest in your head at the time – which, when you’re crying before, during and after work, is not your most strategic thinking.

So here are the questions worth sitting with before you hand in your notice.

Am I clear on what I’m moving toward – or am I just clear on what I’m moving away from?

If the thing I’m running from suddenly disappeared – if that manager left, if that project ended, if that dynamic resolved itself – would I still want to leave? Or is the role itself something I could work with?

Am I making this decision from a place of clarity or a place of desperation? And if it’s desperation – is there anything I can do to get even a small amount of clarity before I move?

What are my actual non-negotiables – not my preferences, my non-negotiables – and does the role I’m considering meet them? Or am I so focused on getting away that I haven’t checked?

These questions don’t always slow you down. Sometimes you work through them and the answer is clear – get out, now, this is not survivable. Sometimes they reveal that you have more options than you thought, or that the move you’re considering isn’t as thought-through as it needs to be.

Either way, you’re better off knowing.

What the Eircode question taught me

Asking for the Eircode before the salary was, in retrospect, one of the clearest signals I’ve ever had that I actually knew what I needed.

Not because the commute was the most important thing about the role objectively. But because I had done enough thinking – over five years of other moves and other decisions – to know what I couldn’t function without. The commute wasn’t a preference I was optimising for. It was a line I had drawn based on real experience of what happens when I cross it.

That’s what clarity feels like from the inside. Not certainty – you rarely get certainty. But a sense of knowing what matters to you specifically, based on what you’ve actually lived, that gives you something solid to make decisions from.

The Engineering Career Clarity Guide is designed to help you build that kind of clarity – before you’re in the position of taking an eighty-minute commute just to get away from someone. It’s free, it takes about an hour, and it’s the thinking that most people do after the move rather than before it.

[Download it here: Before You Update Your CV, Do This First]