My Father’s 35 Years at LA Metro: A Lesson in Hard Work and Consistency

There is a photograph of my family standing on the rocks of a refugee camp in Indonesia. Behind us, the boat that carried us out of Vietnam floats in water so blue it almost looks kind. I am the toddler in the yellow shirt. Everything I know about hard work and consistency starts in that frame.

Forty-six years later, my father would stand in a very different lobby, in downtown Los Angeles, holding a framed certificate. Thirty-five years of service to the Los Angeles MTA. One employer. Three and a half decades. He retired in 2020, and on that day I asked his supervisor a question I had been carrying around for years as a recruiter.

What makes someone come back to the same company for that long?

He did not hesitate.

Six words. I have spent more than 28 years in talent acquisition and executive recruiting, and I have never heard a retention strategy that beats them.

The Boat Before the Résumé

I was born in Binh Minh, Can Tho, a small fishing village in South Vietnam, two years after the Fall of Saigon. My parents did not leave with a career plan. It took four failed escape attempts before they finally got aboard a small boat disguised as a fishing vessel, packed in with 38 other refugees. We were lost at sea for seven days before a passing ship rescued us and brought us ashore in Indonesia.

The camp was a waiting room between one life and another. We lived there for almost a year before word reached my grandmother, who had settled in Orange County, and the sponsorship process began. We arrived in America in 1980. When this country finally opened its door, my father did not walk through it looking for a dream job. He walked through it looking for any job he could do well.

That distinction matters more than most people realize. When work is survival, you do not negotiate with it. You show up. And when survival slowly becomes stability, the showing up does not stop. It becomes character.

He found his way to the Los Angeles MTA, the transit system that moves this city while most of it is still asleep. And then he did the least glamorous, most radical thing a person can do in the modern economy: he stayed.

35 Years, One Employer, Zero Excuses

Here is what 35 years actually looks like up close. It looks like alarm clocks that go off in the dark. My father woke up early and stayed late for decades, not because a performance review demanded it, but because the job was not finished, and he did not know how to leave a job unfinished.

It looks like showing up on the mornings when nobody would have blamed him for calling in. Through recessions. Through the years the family budget was a tightrope. Through raising daughters in a language he was still learning. The buses of Los Angeles do not care how you feel at 4 a.m. Neither did he.

And here is the part no résumé would ever show. After a 12-hour shift behind the wheel of a Los Angeles Metro bus, my father would come home, change, eat dinner, and sit down at an industrial sewing machine next to my mother, who had been sewing since sunrise. Some nights they worked until midnight, finishing entire garment pieces for $1.25 a unit. I learned to sew at 12 so I could help. In our house, hard work was never a lecture. It was the furniture.

We throw the phrase work ethic around like confetti on LinkedIn. But work ethic is not a personality trait you list. It is a pattern you can audit. Pull any week of my father’s 35 years at random and you would find the same entry: woke up early, stayed late, got the job done. That is the entire methodology. There was no hack, no morning routine with a name, no productivity stack. There was a man who decided that his signature was on everything he touched, whether anyone was watching or not.

What His Supervisor Understood About Loyalty

When his supervisor said “never forget where you came from,” he was not being sentimental. He was diagnosing something. People who remember where they came from carry a different relationship with work. Gratitude does not make them soft. It makes them consistent.

My father never forgot the boat. He never forgot the camp. So a hard Tuesday at the yard was never actually a hard Tuesday. It was a Tuesday in America, with a paycheck, a pension building quietly in the background, and a family sleeping safely because of it. When that is your baseline, consistency stops being discipline and starts being gratitude in motion.

Companies spend billions on retention programs, engagement surveys, and culture consultants. My father stayed 35 years because the work meant something, the people respected him, and he refused to be the kind of man who quit things. Sometimes the talent industry overcomplicates what a transit supervisor in Los Angeles understood perfectly.

What 28 Years in Recruiting Taught Me About His Kind of Worker

I have spent my entire adult life in talent acquisition and executive search, more than 28 years and counting, reading résumés the way other people read novels. And I will tell you the quiet truth of my profession: the résumé that impresses me most is not always the one with the biggest logos.

It is the one with evidence of staying power. The candidate who ran toward hard assignments instead of away from them. The leader whose former teams follow them from company to company. The person who can point to something and say: I built that, I maintained that, I did not abandon that when it stopped being exciting.

Because here is what hiring managers are really asking me to find, underneath every job description: someone who will still be excellent when no one is clapping. Skills can be taught. Tools change every 18 months. But the habit of showing up fully, every day, for years? That is formed long before any of us gets involved. Mine was formed watching a man lace up his boots in the dark.

I did not learn recruiting from my father. I learned the thing underneath recruiting: that every placement is a promise, that your name travels farther than your marketing, and that consistency compounds in careers exactly the way interest compounds in accounts. Small daily deposits. Ridiculous long-term returns.

Consistency Is the Quiet Superpower

We live in a market that worships the pivot. Job hopping is rebranded as ambition, and staying is whispered about like a lack of imagination. I place executives for a living, so let me be precise: there are absolutely right times to leave a company. Growth matters. Compensation matters. Bad leadership is a legitimate exit.

But somewhere along the way we confused movement with momentum. My father had momentum. Thirty-five years of it, invisible day to day, undeniable in aggregate. A pension. A paid-off home. Daughters who watched and learned. A supervisor who could summarize his career in six words that were really a compliment dressed as advice.

So this piece is my framed certificate for him, 46 years after a boat and a camp and a decision that the future was worth the water. I have shared parts of our family’s Vietnamese refugee story in Authority Magazine, and in my book, The Journey: Mastering the Art of Slowing Down into a Beautiful Existence. But this chapter belongs to my father. If you are early in your career and wondering what separates the people who build something lasting from the people who just build profiles, I will save you the research.

Wake up early. Stay late when it matters. Get the job done. And never, ever forget where you came from.

It worked for 35 years. It is still working, 28 years and counting, in his daughter.

Cathy Trinh is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Recruiter Hustle, OC/LA’s no-filter media platform for talent, finance, and recruiting professionals.

Heart. Human. Hustle.
Cathy