bloggo ergo sum

Dear readers (all none of you), I’ve been away from my blog for a while now because of life circumstances that required my attention to be invested elsewhere. Hopefully, I will now be able to post something on a semi-regular basis. To explain somewhat:

I worked at a rather large defense contractor as a software engineer. I shan’t mention the name for a number of reasons; one being for my own protection; another being to make at least a nominal effort to not burn bridges.

The work was mostly rewarding. The technology there is quite interesting; in it is an intersection between technology that the commercial sector left behind, technology they’ll never have (with a few exceptions, like some of the more interesting telecoms). Even when compared to the telecoms, there is a segment of the tech there that will never see the light of day. As you might expect, there are both frustrations and excitement involved. For the second half of my tenure there, I began to be seriously frustrated with the corporate culture there; part of it was simply the reality of working for a giant company, and part of it was simply the reality of working for a defense contractor (which makes it like working for two giant companies simultaneously). But there was a third major part of it that was really starting to bother me: I was never going to be deeply involved in the essential business there, and thus my ability to do things I want to do in my career would be artificially limited. That company was a systems integrator, not a software company. To be sure, there were lots of interesting software projects, but that wasn’t the company’s essential business; more like a value-added service that went along with the main business.

There were other secondary issues as well. Most of that didn’t have to do with other people, except as it related to the environment and corporate culture. There were financial incentives to leave as well.

So I stuck to my work, and didn’t talk about leaving and kept it a secret that I was looking. I wasn’t looking hard, though. I was passively observing the local tech market, looking for a landing pad. I interviewed a couple of times, including once with a premier Valley firm. Ultimately though, I decided I didn’t want to become a Californicator. There were a couple of potential openings that I found through personal contacts, including one with my brother at his trading firm in New York. I pursued that option for a couple months and had it all settled out, and the credit market problems ended up closing that door for me. I went back to my contacts again, and it turned out that the timing was just right for me to join up with a small .NET/SharePoint consulting firm in Dallas, called Cogent, with whom I now work.

One of the benefits of working for Cogent is that they encourage the developers to write blogs and articles, because it increases their exposure, so I hope to be able to post at least a few times a month on topics of interest to me.