Phew! This has been a whirlwind week and I can now break the silence and talk about it openly. Today, I gave Boomer Consulting two weeks notice and signed my shiny new contract to start work with Grant Street Group. This has been simmering for a bit, so I’ll tell the story of how we got here.
A little more than two years ago I left Kansas State University to give up systems administration to seek a job in software development. I had some pretty strict limits on what I was looking for location-wise (Manhattan, Kansas only) and a friend of mine let me know that his company, Boomer Consulting, was looking for a software developer. The job was to be primarily customizing a Java-based CMS called Magnolia. I interviewed, was offered a position, and took the job. From there we added PHP-based Drupal and some other Perl-based apps to the list of things to do, which was quite a lot for a lone dev. Things at Boomer have been rocky from time to time, but overall it’s been a good experience. In the end, I’m leaving because Boomer is refocusing how it improves it’s software and I no longer feel like I’m a good fit for this direction.
When I determined that things at Boomer were drawing to a close, I began searching for positions. This time around I was a little freer to decide on location, but I still had a very strong desire to stay in Kansas or at least a neighboring state. My two main goals in this job search were to find a job primarily working in Perl, since I’m having fun with it and it’s a focus for me right now, and either a job in Kansas or nearby or would allow me to work from home. I even considered a couple positions out of the area to make sure I wasn’t missing out on anything important, but only if it looked like a really good opportunity.
I talked with a recruiter for a hospital informatics company in Nashville. I also talked with a certain movie database company in Seattle. However, neither opportunity was exciting enough to justify uprooting our family. As much as I love the Seattle area and as much as the housing market in Nashville is appealing, extended family and our friends in town are too important to leave for a so-so job opportunity.
Other than those and the company I’m moving toward, I also spoke with the folks at a certain wiki company in California and a company that develops software for building surveys for Fortune 500 companies. All of these were telecommute positions that would allow me to work almost entirely from home with the possibility of travel to home offices a few times every year.
This past week I actually interviewed in both Seattle and in Pittsburgh (that’s PA not KS, which is Pittsburg without the “H”). This was a lot of flying and odd sleep patterns, which unfortunately ended in a migraine on Saturday. In Pittsburgh, I had a chance to meet with the folks at Grant Street Group and I got a really good feeling from everyone I spoke with. The offer they gave me is exciting and, frankly, better than I really expected. Therefore, I will be learning the ropes for Grant Street Group in the next few weeks.
Anyway, I wanted to let all my friends and fans (all 4 of them, cough) as soon as possible because I’m kind of tired of being discrete about the fact that I was searching for a job.
Cheers.
