Recently in Jobness Category

This afternoon I tendered my resignation. I leave behind a great group of people on the cusp of major to stratospheric success. It was a very hard decision, but my destiny lies elsewhere.

The top half of the page at left isn’t as true as it’s been in the past, making the decision all the more difficult. But the bottom half sings a profound truth.

I was not looking for a new gig. But a few kept landing in my lap that I couldn’t pass up. I’ve accepted the senior developer position at Emmet Labs, an early-stage social platform startup in San Francisco.

There are many reasons this excites me: learning a lot while working on interesting problems in a cool (metaphorical) space surrounded by fascinating (and occasionally famous) people in a dynamic and passion-driven environment. That’s where I thrive!

Obviously there are a lot of other, less exciting emotions tied to the coming and the going, but I feel the need to keep this entry short. Perhaps I’ll catalogue them in a future post.

In preparation for a demo that could lead to a huge opportunity, I worked two weeks straight, most nights until midnight, sometimes until after 2am. No rest for the wicked weary on the two weekends, I just plowed straight through.

I’m done, back banging on the stuff on which I should be working, and I was very much looking forward to a respite this weekend.

There’s just one minor glitch. The problem I left on Friday evening is sticking in my craw. It’s interesting. I know I should leave it until Monday, but here I am logging into the VPN to grab the file so I can at least map out how I think it should be solved.

Hopefully that will exorcise this demon, and I can go back to enjoying a weekend with my sweetie.

My ride to the train station was HOT today. Plus, I'd left myself little alternative than to sprint the whole way. Into a nasty headwind. Again. I am very fortunate that the trains have air-conditioning.

Friday took its sweet-assed time getting here. Next week looks to be more of a bitch than this week, one thing in particular that I'll probably kvetch about later.

But as the miles unfold between myself and Sunnyvale, my stress level unwinds. I'll be home soon. I get to see my sweetie (haven't really been awake at the same time for the last 48hrs) We have a full weekend ahead of us, but it's all things we've been anticipating for a while.

It's good that I have this time to unwind.

At this moment, I am sitting in my backyard with a glass of cider at my side and my bare feet swishing through the grass. Technology is grand. This is a much more civilized way to spend an evening than my evenings of late. I'm feeling more relaxed than I have in some time. In the back of my mind, I have blog entries in the works hanging over my head, but it's hardly a Sword of Damocles, and who knows, I may yet get to one of them.

This afternoon my employers took us all out to Campo di Bocce as a show of gratitude for our delivering our 2.2 release, and making our numbers this past quater. We had a nice lunch, and then retired to the courts.

This was an altogether different experience from playing in my grandparents (Nazzaro, to give you some perspective) backyard. First of all, there was alcohol involved (well, ok, that's not different, but I was partaking). On the whole, though, there was a lot less yelling and gesticulating (and tantrums, and nobody was ever struck with a flying pallino). A very different game, indeed.

But on the whole, I enjoyed myself, and I might consider going back at a future date. I'll even promise to be on my best behavior.

I think I'll working the photos I took instead of the entries that are still rolling around in my head.

"Aww, it's just like being at school again. The weather changed while we were inside, and it changed again before we left."
-- Sean

Yes, I have just broken my own "It's not tomorrow until I go to bed, or the sun comes up." axiom. Sue me. I worked 15 hrs. today.

I've been meaning to post something here for a while, I've even composed a few in my head. At first I marveled at how my world was about to be turned inside out, and yet I didn't feel that anything had changed. I just blithely went about my remaining days in Chicago barely registering anything.

And now I'm here. The job (for all of three days) has been fantastic. Matt & Sean are great, I know I'll have fun working with them, everyone's really energetic, and the problems I'm going to work on look like a lot of fun.

...and yet, I'm still "just visiting." I'm sure this is exacerbated by my lack of a place of "my own," but I can't escape the feeling that this is a very short-term trip. Any day now I'm going home. "Home" being a loaded term in it's own right. (For many months in Chicago this was "back home")

I feel caught between the two worlds. I love being back in the fray, I love being back in the Bay, and yet, I look around and everything seem so superficial. It's all so ...sanitized is the only word I find. Hospital clean. I miss the grittiness of my old neighborhood.

And, of course, this nostalgia is itself a delusion (but that's the nature of nostalgia) I spent most of my time in Chicago wishing (consciously or otherwise) that I was here. Granted, my coping skills were seriously hampered, but I still have to wonder.

The short of it is I miss my friends. I miss Yoj. I miss my psycho-stupid cat. I just need to embark on my master plan to move all of those things here. Or not here. Oakland maybe. They'd get along fine in Oakland.

It's official. The whirlwind of the past few weeks has settled. On my desk is a copy of an offer letter that I have signed and returned. My mind continues to grapple unsuccessfully with the bittersweet realization that I'm leaving.

My new job is back in California. It's so funny, I spent most of my time in Chicago in a melancholic depression. I didn't feel that I truly belonged here until very recently. (And that's not a slight on those who have tried to make me feel welcome, I can't imagine trying to survive here without you guys.) Just as I'm coming to appreciate where I am, it's time for me to go.

But this kind of opportunity doesn't come around very often. It's basically my ideal position. I'll be a Senior Application Software Engineer for a 60 person firm in SunnyHell^H^H^H^Hvale. My group (currently just [bit-rot] Matt, Sean, and I) is charged with developing applications to create turn-key solutions for enterprise customers based on our standard developer framework.

(Apparently, my job also involves taking some of the workload off of Sean who needs a vacation. :-)

Wow. I just returned from my latest interview, and it went a lot better than I had any right to hope it would. I've been fretting since Friday when they called to make the appointment. As I've mentioned before, my technical skills are not exactly a perfect match, so I was certain that it was going to be an embarrassing barrage of questions that I couldn't answer.

Instead, they were interested in probing my customer support skills, and were very receptive to what I had to say. The more I spoke to them, the more excited I got. They liked the breadth of experience I could bring to the position, and the fact that I obviously have some experience dealing with irate and irrational users (in particular, they seemed to enjoy my use of the term "triage" for the inevitable case of dealing with more than one at a time, and that it's better (when possible) to give people waiting something to do (something to try) so they're not sitting on their thumb (stewing in the case of the irrational user)).

And it's quite a bit more of a challenge than I originally thought. I would be responsible for keeping the IT infrastructure for a few different offices running, and eventually responsible for mentoring and coaching new administrators in some fo those offices. It'd be a great challenge. And there's some travel involved.

I've been applying to this job since July. I'm now one of 3 candidates, out of an initial cast of thousands. Every step of the way, I've had the same moment. "Well, this sounds good, but I'm not going to make the next cut." Going in today, I was certain that I would come out beaten. When I left, I felt good. I said to myself, "I may not make the final cut, but at least I know that it's because they chose a better candidate, not because I couldn't do the job." It was a great feeling. I figure I'll know by February, if their past track record has been any indication.

I got the word, My interview in California didn't go as well as I'd hoped. I dreaded this moment. I was very excited about this prospect (it being, in effect, my only real prospect) and I tried as hard as I could to keep my hopes grounded. But I failed. And so I found myself worrying that if it didn't come through I'd be crushed.

In retrospect, there were too many questions to which I should have (and did at one time) known answers. They were also skeptical that a software engineer would be willing/able to make the jump to system administration, and I could have spoken more to that, rather than simply assuring them that it really wasn't that different from where my experience lay. (I've always had system administration tasks as part of my responsibilities, nevermind the time sink that is slackers.net. :)

There is no doubt that it would have been a great opportunity for me, and a position in which I would have thrived (conveniently ignoring their doubt for the moment). But everything must happen for a reason (even if we don't particularly like the reason). And so I see that this door closing is not the end I feared it would be. In fact it has helped to open two more.

I had a job interview last Friday, in my old stomping ground (Mountain View). It's a position I'm really excited about. But I was more than a little concerned about this impromptu homecoming, however brief.

Recently I've found myself idealizing the time that I spent there. I re-read Tales of the City, I've spent a lot of time talking to friends in the area (that I called home). I've been thinking about what would happen if I got this job.

I was worried that I'd have so much fun with this visit, that I'd feel so good being back that I'd have a crisis of self/identity/whatever and decide that I had to get back there any way I could.

I had a very visceral reaction to being back, but not the one I expected. I hated being there. It felt like a huge step backward into the rut that I climbed out of when I left. I had a great time seeing people, and I miss them again now that I'm gone, but I realized that have no stomach left for the suburban sprawl of the Peninsula. I couldn't afford to go back where I'd been.

It is still home. And I still very much want this job to work out, but I need to live in an urban environment. I need to have people around. I need to be able to WALK to see people/go out. I need culture. I need to be more than the drone I'd become living in Suburban Hell. So once again I find myself planning to live in San Francisco.

There were a few very surprising side-effects to this trip. I realized that I'm more at home in Chicago than I believed. I'd been in denial for some time. I kept telling myself that the Bay Area was home, and my only home. I now realize how silly that uncharacteristically singular view was. Adopting a more familiar continuum view, I can accept that Chicago is home right now without betraying my feeling that I will go back to the Bay Area.

The other side-effect was that once I realized that Chicago is also home, I realized that I'm not as miserable here as I'd been leading myself to believe (if that makes any sense at all). Life here is not without it's issues (drama-queen tendencies aside) but the time has come to take an active role in living it.