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Moving on
posted Thursday, 16 September 2004
It is always interesting when you move jobs. Today is my last day at my current job and like many jobs I have left before it has been full of mixed emotions. Happiness about moving forward and sadness about the people and times I have left behind. Of course this is little surprise as most people spend at least 50% of their life at work.
It has been interesting an interesting three years as I started there as a contractor in 2001 whilst the entire industry was crashing around me. I was lucky as not only did they give me a good rate but they also sponsored my H1B when most companies would not even look at you. At the time I was one of only two external contractors with the rest of the development group either working for a private consultancy firm or they came from Organic or BEA as consultants. The BEA and Organic guys pretty much did not know which way was up. Most of them could code but none of them had an idea on how to jump from coding to actually building an application for deployment.
After six months my boss ask me to become the project architect. I set about changing the make up of the team and fading out the external contractors and consultants who where bleeding us dry. It felt very good to turn things around. The initial release of the application and product went really well and for while things looked really good.
Sadly we very quickly became a victim of our own success. The company was split into two pieces in geographically different locations one on the east coast in New Jersey and then the other initially being San Francisco. Then IT was moved out of San Francisco to Walnut Creek which made my commute over an hour. Things on a business side then also hit some road bumps. Hiring started to get out of control with people getting hired and then feeling they needed to hire people to work for them. This could have been part of becoming a big company but then we hit a wall in terms of subscriber as subscriber churn rocketed causing the base number of subscribers to stall. Yet the hiring just kept going and no one seemed to be that bothered.
As I came up to my three anniversary I started to think about the way ahead. I was tired of the 1 hour commute that I had been doing for a year, I did not want to work another Christmas as holiday technical support had meant the last two holidays seasons had been a complete wash out, and with a baby on the way in the next two weeks if I wanted to make a change now was the time. A friend of mine therefore got me lined for a position in the city with more money so I decided to give it a go.
Tomorrow is the first day at my new job. Proving once again the only thing constant in life other than death is change.
It has been interesting an interesting three years as I started there as a contractor in 2001 whilst the entire industry was crashing around me. I was lucky as not only did they give me a good rate but they also sponsored my H1B when most companies would not even look at you. At the time I was one of only two external contractors with the rest of the development group either working for a private consultancy firm or they came from Organic or BEA as consultants. The BEA and Organic guys pretty much did not know which way was up. Most of them could code but none of them had an idea on how to jump from coding to actually building an application for deployment.
After six months my boss ask me to become the project architect. I set about changing the make up of the team and fading out the external contractors and consultants who where bleeding us dry. It felt very good to turn things around. The initial release of the application and product went really well and for while things looked really good.
Sadly we very quickly became a victim of our own success. The company was split into two pieces in geographically different locations one on the east coast in New Jersey and then the other initially being San Francisco. Then IT was moved out of San Francisco to Walnut Creek which made my commute over an hour. Things on a business side then also hit some road bumps. Hiring started to get out of control with people getting hired and then feeling they needed to hire people to work for them. This could have been part of becoming a big company but then we hit a wall in terms of subscriber as subscriber churn rocketed causing the base number of subscribers to stall. Yet the hiring just kept going and no one seemed to be that bothered.
As I came up to my three anniversary I started to think about the way ahead. I was tired of the 1 hour commute that I had been doing for a year, I did not want to work another Christmas as holiday technical support had meant the last two holidays seasons had been a complete wash out, and with a baby on the way in the next two weeks if I wanted to make a change now was the time. A friend of mine therefore got me lined for a position in the city with more money so I decided to give it a go.
Tomorrow is the first day at my new job. Proving once again the only thing constant in life other than death is change.
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