Endings and Beginnings

Tomorrow is the beginning of my last full week with Alphawest - I'm working up until the 18th, a Tuesday. Soon will come the "last" events, the last Monday, the last team meeting, the last lunch from my favourite local salad bar. I've already removed a lot of my personal effects from my cubical - some stuff transferred to my new office, some to my home. I already have my new business cards, and I'm aiming to hit the ground running. Happily TestLogistics (my new employer) is not in thrall to Microsoft, and they do not use Exchange: they use Google's commercial mail offering, which means that I can use any mail client I choose. In fact, no one is going to enforce a Standard Operating Environment, or expect me to comply with one. The great advantage of working with a team almost all of whom are "technical" is that there is an expectation that we can all take care of our own environments in a responsible manner.

This doesn't work in larger companies, because as soon as you have a significant contingent of clerical staff, you need to take steps to prevent them bringing malware inside the perimeter, unless you can prevent them using Microsoft products, and those seem to be the default choice for most companies. I can't think why - Microsoft makes ugly, expensive software, every bit of which can be replaced with something cheaper if you just bother to check the options. IT managers protest that using Microsoft is cheaper, while they pay exorbitant licensing costs, and waste hours of staff overtime patching, fixing things that patching broke, and dealing with outbreaks of malware. What they really mean is "the Microsoft certification exam was easy, and managing this stuff gives me a job for life".

I plan to enjoy the freedom to select my own tools to enable me to work more efficiently. I've set up OmniFocus for task management - I live by my to do list these days - and I hope to reduce Windows to something that I only need to run Visio. And only I plan to use that when a customer insists - Omnigraffle should meet my day to day diagramming needs. The thought of a working environment that is not bogged down with Managesoft, Active Directory, and never ending antivirus scanning routines is very appealing.

Roll on the 18th

Moving on

It is amazing what changes the passing of a few days can bring. When I went to work on April 12th I little thought that I would be looking for a new job by the end of the day, or that I would be resigning from my old job in less than two weeks.

On April 12th we were assembled for a "company update" and informed that our office was being moved from the current Sydney CBD location to an unspecified building in Macquarie Park. The news was greeted with something less than enthusiasm - in fact it went down like the proverbial lead balloon - and I went home, did a fast update on my resume, and sent it to a couple of recruiters.

If you have ever spent much time in Sydney, the problem with the proposed office relocation will be obvious, but if you haven't, it goes like this. The Sydney central business district is at the south end of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Macquarie Park is well north of the bridge. The bridge is a major traffic bottle neck on good days. On bad days, it's a car park. I used to work in North Sydney (just north of the bridge) when I worked for Sun, and when I quit that job I vowed that in the future I would avoid any position that required me to commute across the Harbour Bridge. I am just not prepared to waste hours every week stuck in traffic. Forget public transport: the New South Wales state governments for the last few decades have completely failed to provide Sydney with anything even vaguely resembling efficient public transport. This has nothing to do with politics, just the fact that our state governments tend to talk a lot about infrastructure, but they deliver next to nothing. A sane person might well question why the hell we have state governments: they seem to be an expensive but quite impractical luxury. We also have local and federal governments, so why the useless layer of state-based parasites? However, I digress.

When I first heard rumours that we might be relocated I did the necessary analysis - which took about 5 seconds - and I had already made up my mind that I was not going to work at Macquarie Park. I have to go up there occasionally to work on the Optus campus, and I already know how horrible it is. So I sent out my resume, did a couple of interviews, and I got a letter of offer on Thursday. I resigned yesterday morning, and I have received a stream of emails, phone calls and LinkedIn comments from colleagues past and present, friends and vendor representatives, variously protesting my decision, congratulating me on the new job, or asking "can I come too?". I imagine that there will be more next week, when people get back to work after the Anzac Day long weekend.

My new employer will be TestLogistics, and several of my former colleagues from Sun already work there, so it should be fun. It's a small company, unburdened by excessive bureaucracy (no one has asked for my resume, and I've seen no sign of an HR department). They try only to hire people that someone already in the company knows and recommends; and they believe that, if they hire clever people, then they can solve anything. I'm honoured by their faith in me.

What the job actually is, at a detailed level, I'll find out on May 24th.