Life Update

You may have noticed that the blurb about me has changed slightly. My career status has been in flux over the last few months, but has now settled. Back in January the project I was working on at HP was canceled. My rather large R&D lab was told that we no longer had work to do. Our only job was to find another job. The upper managers would try to find spots for us on other projects within HP, but we were basically told to not hold our breath. So I didn't. I updated my resume and went to work. I interviewed with an interesting company located about an hour away from my home, up the Columbia Gorge, named Insitu. They were (and still are) busy interviewing and hiring many people and it took a while to hear back from them. In the meantime I was offered another position at HP. Not having anything else firm, I accepted. I quickly learned that it was a .NET/C# windoze programming position. No more playing with hardware, no more bit twiddling register manipulations, no more ISRs, no more using an oscilloscope to debug my code. I was sad, but I tried to have a good attitude. C# has some interesting things about it, right? Well, when I heard back from Insitu with a job offer to do embedded software, it was very tempting. When I considered more interesting work at a place that is hiring and growing rather than laying people off, the choice seemed pretty clear. The big downside is that 1 hour commute each way. HP was only 5 minutes away. I could move my family to White Salmon and get the same commute, but we aren't there yet. And so I drive. And listen to books on CD. It's not too bad. The work, and work environment, is just about what I imagined it would be as well. Upbeat, excited, and employee friendly. I have hardware on my desk again, and they even bought me a pair of ESD safe shoes.

Comments

ashawley said…
Piece of mind is the most important quality of a job. Congratulations!
May 6, 2009 at 6:23 AM
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