Taking the Summer Off

As many of you who are reading this know, a couple months ago my company decided to close its Bellevue office and laid us all off.  I was part of the transition team that was retained until May 3 to help move our work from Bellevue to Kiev.  While May 3 is technically my last day at Serena, Thursday was my last day in the office and today starts my "summer".

Rather than jump back into another job, I decided to take a break for the summer to work on some projects.  I'm going to try to blog about my day-to-day activities though won't necessarily post daily. One thing I want to do is take an extended trip to Las Vegas though this seems harder and harder to fit in around other plans.

What I Do

Since I started by new job in August I find it hard to explain to people, especially those not in software development exactly what it is that I do and what my company does. Serena recently updated our web site and has a ton of information about Agile on Demand. There's also a picture of me and my co-workers on the site.

The information is very high level and you can click through in ten minutes and get of what we do.

New job

This post is long overdue. Sorry.

I started a new job four weeks ago working for Serena software. We're building Agile on Demand which is the product you see featured on the front page of the web site. It's a tool for managing Agile software projects that you'll access via your browser. The job is great, the people are great, and I feel like I'm making a real impact.

I left Ascentium at the end of July. Basically after being there for a year, my mom still couldn't remember the name of the company I worked for or what I did, so I decided to help her out. Seriously though, it just wasn't quite what I envisioned. When I interviewed and accepted the position, I really liked the people, though doing consulting would be a good experience, but was a bit apprehensive about the consulting structure and tracking hours rather than tracking work completed. And it stayed the same throughout. I liked the people and still do and miss the ones I don't see on a daily basis. And it was great when I was full-time on one project from January through March. But once that project abruptly ended, it was constant chaos trying to fill my hours and figure out if projects were real or just planned. I knew I'd be working on a number of projects and some would be short, but I always figured there'd be a backlog of waiting or upcoming projects to jump on and possibly people would be fighting for my time. Instead there just wasn't enough work and I felt like a contractor searching for work at times. I was salaried and still got paid but in the slow weeks didn't feel it was fulfilling enough. It's a good place and I'd even go back as a contractor -- I get paid when I work, I have free time when there isn't work -- but it just wasn't the right fit for me at this point.

Being back in the product world, rather than projects, I feel happier and am actually excited to see this huge pile of automation work we have to do. Oh, and I'm a pig. Mom, that should be easy to remember, but maybe it's not something to share with your friends over Rosh Hashanah dinner.

New Job

I started a new job last Tuesday. I'm a senior SDET (software development engineer in test) at ascentium. While it's a new job title, it's effectively the same kind of work -- software testing (finding bugs and improving product quality before the customer gets the product) with an emphasis on writing and understanding code to test the product.

I never blogged much about my job search though I had some interesting experiences to share. In this technology era, I think many responsible interviewers will look for a candidates personal blog, and blog with lots of posts griping about other interviews could be strike one against me before I get my foot in the door. Likewise while it may be cathartic to vent about your job and many people have blogs full of job gripes, in the tech world you have to realize your boss and your co-workers are reading it, so don't expect much about my job here.

That said, so far so good. I like the people I'm working with, which is key, and so far I've gotten enough guidance to get running and then been left alone to do my own thing. I am jumping in to the fire with both feet as our first ZBR/RC0 goal is this week and I'm the one tester on the project. (Tech people will understand that, non-tech people don't worry about it.)

Oh, one thing of note. I'm trying something different and being a morning person at this job. Monica has been getting up at 5/5:30 for her classes at Boeing and as long as I'm up, I'm trying to be productive (note the time of this post). That said I don't think I'll make it out of the house by 7 today.