"If We Don't Hire That Guy, We're Stupid": From Submarine Engine Room to Chief Accounting Officer
Veterans in the Park
Shayne Kuhaneck joined the Navy's nuclear power program in 1992 and spent six years as a machinist mate on a fast-attack submarine out of Pearl Harbor. Today he is the chief accounting officer at a software company. Almost none of the distance between those two jobs was planned.
He walks through the actual sequence. The six-year mark, where re-enlisting for two more years really meant deciding whether to do twenty. A final year with ten months of it spent at sea. A first civilian job at a trash-burning power plant that looked nothing like the tour he was given on interview day — "something out of a Stephen King novel" — and that he left after two weeks. Then a recruiter's phone call that opened with, "What do you know about cryogenic liquid?"
He also covers what nobody told him on the way out: that naval nuclear power school converts to real college credit if you file the paperwork, and that a state education benefit he found by accident is what put him through the University of Connecticut. His message to his younger self is blunt — do your homework, find out every benefit you earned, and use all of them.
The episode ends where a lot of transitions stall: how to talk about service in a room full of civilians. Shayne's answer is the story he told a Big Four interviewer about the night his submarine lost propulsion — and what the interviewer said about him on the way out of the building.
A conversation between two people who were in at the same time on opposite sides of the pier. Whether you are at a re-enlistment decision, holding a first civilian job that isn't working, or trying to explain what your rate actually meant, this one is worth the twenty minutes.
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