A full year ago, I left my job to take some time off and prepare to make a determined career shift. I talked about a lot of that in this entry from February 2018. Now, a full year later, I have indeed landed a job in the desired tech sector and am starting tomorrow, and so wanted to take the time to reflect on the past year.
Going into the "sabbatical", my intent was to tackle a couple personal projects that had been getting delayed endlessly, and to generally be able to "say yes" to a lot of opportunities and invitations. While I did intend to get back to work, I did want to take some time off and not focus on career for a little while, before circling back and ramping up work again, but this time in a new field. I therefore spent the first five months primarily focused on personal projects, including one project in particular, and then after that I started looking at job opportunities.
However I really was (and am) determined to now work in a tech sector that is personally meaningful, and so I remained focused on a very small number of companies in that space. I am also firm about staying in Atlanta for now, and in fact not wanting to even commute too far, and set the Perimeter (I-285 ring around the city) as the limit on how far I was willing to go. My focus on a particular tech sector and my geographic limits really did filter down the possible companies to very few.
In fact, starting in 2017, I had already started reaching out to two specific companies. I got introduced to an executive at each firm, and invited both (individually) to meet me at my workplace and get a tour -- where I was working at the time is a very interesting place and a frankly thrilling place to tour. Nothing concrete came out of those meetings, but it got me some face time with those executives and gave me some insight into their respective businesses.
I was also open to joining a startup company, which is risky of course, but I felt I was now in a position to take that risk. However, it's hard to find these companies, and hard for them to find me. I went to startup battle events, talked to people, went to conferences and networking events, tried to keep up with news, but never did find my way in there.
By the fifth month (August) I had finished a number of personal projects, had done lots of fun things, and was feeling ready to get back to work. My general demeanor during the first five months was "I hope nobody offers me a job because I don't want to go back to work yet." Starting at the fifth month, that turned into "if somebody hired me now I'd be OK with that", and that is when I started looking for specific positions, within the two major constraints mentioned above.
Right away, on literally the first morning of this second phase, I saw that one of the candidate companies had a position open that I thought I'd be a good fit for. It was a bit of a shock, actually, and took me a day to process that, yes, it was time to really get back onto the work treadmill. I also needed to hurry up and apply some pending minor updates to my resume and website. However a day later when I went back to properly apply for the job ... it was gone! What?! This was at one of the two companies that I had been talking to since 2017 (mentioned above), and so I immediately reached out to the executive at that company. Without really explaining why the position opening had disappeared, they invited me to come in for an interview, which I did, having a long talk with the CEO and a manager. A couple weeks later I followed up, and they said they had decided to "go in a different direction" or something like that. Of course I assumed they'd hired somebody else, but I later met with my executive friend and learned that they had actually decided not to fill the position at all. Expanding that part of their business was something they had been discussing internally, and apparently they had changed their mind about expanding that business and therefore hiring anyone at all. I think that company had had a contraction in business and was tightening their belts.
I resumed my general hunt, attending meetings and conferences, working on personal projects.
In October (month 7), a position opened up at the other company I had been following (the other executive of the two mentioned above). This was exactly the kind of position at that company that I thought I'd be a good fit for, a great way to transition into their business and make use of those skills of mine that were "portable". I went though a series of interviews, which all went great, although in the last interview with an upper management executive, he seemed kind of "checked out" like he was really disinterested. A week or so later I followed up, and they had hired someone else. That was a huge disappointment, because I really thought this position was a great path for me to segue into that company.
That was a bummer, and I stopped pressing on those original targets for a while. I tried some hail-mary passes to other companies in another area of interest, that were definitely a stretch, but they were at least local. I mostly focused on personal work and started to plan for the upcoming holidays.
At the very end of November, beginning of December (month 9), I discovered a third company that fit my needs. Not only were they in the right tech sector, and located ridiculously close to home, but one of their product offerings was the type of system that I had been the expert in at my previous employer. I reached out to them (once again going straight to the president), and after some persistence, got their attention and was brought in for an interview. I hadn't approached them about a specific position, but when they invited me in, they had provided a position description document. I studied that document, and while I certainly satisfied many of the requirements, there were several areas where I did not. Notably, the position description mentioned the need for expertise in a couple software packages that I either A) had no experience at all with, or B) hadn't really used in decades.
Since at this point we were approaching the end of year holidays, we pushed that first interview out to January. That then gave me a chance, after returning home from our own holiday travel, to really study up on those two software packages. I spent a week intensely learning (or relearning) how to use them, so I could say "yes" when asked about them in the interview, and even be prepared to demonstrate my knowledge. I also decided to pursue a particularly relevant professional certification used in that industry, and that ended up taking another week or two. Actually there was a fair bit of drama in getting that cert; buy me a beer and I'll tell you the story.
I went into that interview very well prepared, and the interview went great, talking to two executives at the company. It's a very small company (single digits) and I'd be helping the one engineer they had (a cofounder of the company) to deal with the pipeline of work. Their comments at the end of the meeting sounded very positive, and followup emails sounded good, and I eventually got chance to sit down with the president (the other cofounder) as well and had a great conversation with him too. This all looked very promising and a nearly perfect fit, but it was definitely going slowly. It sounded like they were still a couple months away from being ready to expand and take me on, which I OK with as I was still happily working down my personal project backlog.
In the middle of this, in early February (month 11!), one of the first two companies reached back out to me and said they had a position in mind for me. Well, that was a nice surprise -- they called me. On the phone, with just a sentence or two from them describing the position, I confirmed that I was still interested, and they brought me in to have lunch with two top executives (and I mean top, C-suite execs). It seemed that my cultivation of one of those executives, going back nearly two years, was finally paying off, since it really seemed like he wanted to hire me and just needed my help to convince everyone else. So I met with his boss, CTO of the global firm, which went very well. Just days later I was brought in for a series of interviews with the engineering managers that I'd be working with. Some of those interviews were a little dry, which one could chalk up to engineers not being people persons, but I was also paranoid that this would somehow scuttle the process. You never really know, right? After a few days of quiet, they called me back and offered me the job! Whew!
My first day is March 11th, tomorrow as I post this, which will then have been exactly one year from when I left my previous job -- and career.
So, what did I do in that year?
First and foremost, I got the bulk of work done on my father's memoirs. I'm sure I'll write a separate post about this later this year, but for four years (hmm, probably five by now) I've been working with my elderly father on assembling a book about his life, an autobiography. Since we started this, he's been writing material and I've been collecting it, but I wasn't making much progress on my end. There was a ton of basic copy editing to be done, and more general editing that really required long term focus. For example, some of the stories about his life (chapters, if you will) had actually been written twice -- once early on, and then all over again more recently. I would need to review those two versions and merge them.
I had spent 2017, before I left my previous job, trying to make progress on this particular project, but found that I wasn't really getting it done with just with an hour or two on weeknights and weekends. It was going to take real focus, for days on end, to plow through the 500 pages of material. So literally on the first day of this sabbatical, I sat down with all of the papers and computer files and started organizing the whole thing, eventually setting up a copy-editing process that worked. Four months later I had finished the bulk copy editing and fact checking, and then moved into formatting and preparing for print. That part went relatively quickly, once I learned the basics of book design -- especially the design of the "front matter", the first dozen or so pages at the front of a book that you take for granted, but which actually have designs and purposes that have been honed over the centuries of book creation.
I got the print run back from the printer (Bookbaby) with a whole week to spare before our annual family reunion, and was able to distribute copies to the family.
Now, I did have to cut a few corners to get the book done on time. The two big corner-cuts were A) a nice book cover design and B) including pictures and other image scans in the book. The book I had produced had neither of those, so I'm calling what I got done in July 2018 the "first edition", and will have a second edition done by July 2019. Most important, I got the major, difficult copy-editing and book design work behind me; the rest of the work can indeed be chopped up into 1-2 hour sessions on nights and weekends.
That was the first project, and what drove me to realize that I needed to take some time off between jobs.
The second priority was a long-delayed house repair project. We have an old house built in 1910 -- it's not historically significant or anything like that, but it's a cool old house with lots of charm. Less charming are the leaky old windows in the older part of the house, and I've long been wanting to get them restored. I had considered doing them myself, but not really. Problem is, apparently restoring old windows is really hard to do -- everybody just replaces them instead, which I absolutely refused to do. Windows contribute to the exterior look of a house the same way eyes do to your face, and anything you replace them with won't look quite right. Window restoration contractors do exist, but they are incredible hard to find and interminably busy. The one regional expert I kept getting pointed to was A) booked for months, B) insanely expensive and C) wanted to remove the windows (boarding up the house) and work on them in his shop for 4-8 weeks. Yikes!
I'd been trying to get this done for literally two years and kept failing to find a contractor that could do it for a reasonable amount of money and with a reasonable impact on our lives. I eventually found an independent contractor, literally one guy, who would do the work. And so for two months, he came to the house every day and slowly dismantled, restored and reassembled the six big old windows in our house. Besides giving him access to the house and securing away the pets, it was useful for me to be onsite the whole time to answer questions or witness discoveries. I didn't help do the actual restoration work, rather made sure he had what he needed (including access) and then just observed and guided as needed. The contractor was the expert in old house restoration and I just let him do his thing. In the end it was still expensive but half the price of the top guy in town, and didn't require boarding up the house for months.
Those were the two big priorities going in. Other house projects:
- new sidewalk in the front of the house (contractor coordination, and prep cleaning by me)
- new gutter installed over back door entrance (contractor coordination)
- new rain barrel fed by above gutter
- new solar-powered garden water pressurizing system fed by above rain barrel (an ongoing "science project"!)
- planned to replace an old HVAC unit, but the quotes came in so high that we are punting on that one ...
Car-related fun activities:
- kept up with the progress on the first Electrify America site in metro Atlanta (lots of trips to Kennesaw)
- went on a little two-day roadtrip into NC and TN with an EV friend, checking out the first Electrify America charging sites in the southeast
- went to an NHRA drag racing event in Commerce Ga, unfortunately damaging my hearing
- went to the annual Petit Le Mans race at Road Atlanta in Braselton GA
- went to the annual Atlanta Concours show at Chateau Elan to see a bunch of classic cars including a friend's new restoration
- test drove a Tesla Model 3, only because Tesla sales kept pestering me, I swear :)
- worked a few more EV outreach events than usual, including a trip to the state Capitol
Other fun activities
- explored the new Proctor Creek trails
- saw an amazing presentation by Stephen Wolfram at Georgia Tech
- attended the annual space exploration conference at Tech
- went on a group "birding" hike with a friend
- built and mounted two "pinhole cameras" to capture the sun's path for six months
- went on a hike of Providence Canyon and visited Pasaquan again
- saw a bunch of bands, caught up with old friends
- welcomed family to town and visited the always astonishing Georgia Aquarium
- went on a weekend field trip to mines near Augusta with the Georgia Geology Society
- was able to put more effort than usual into our annual moon party!
- kept up with countless missions to deep space and the burgeoning commercial space launch business
- attended the incredible and sobering refugee exhibit put on by Doctors Without Borders
- traveled to Chicago to visit family (and see Hamilton)
- traveled to NJ/NYC to visit family and be a tourist
- traveled to Germany and London!
Other professional-ish activities:
- attended a number of startup-battle kinds of events, looking for startups I might be interested in
- attended a technical (energy-related) conference in Charlotte NC
- attended a day-long product training session for the company that later hired me!
- attended the always-excellent "solar summit", a day-long conference held every year at the Carter Center
- got more involved in "energy access", trying to get electricity to the 1.1 billion people that have none
- attended every local professional chapter meeting, being able to stay long and talk to people, no work conflicts
- got more involved with the local chapter of Engineers Without Border, which so far seems pretty dysfunctional
- gave a presentation at a private corporate conference about the business I used to work in
- helped promote the Solarize Atlanta program (ended in December)
- visited a commercial solar power system with a colleague who was inspecting it for final signoff
And now, back to work.