Gut Check

Today at around 10am I quit my job. 

Normally I don't discuss work related things, because it is a segment of my life I try to keep off the internet.  But, I think it feels sort of good to get it all out.  This, afterall, was not a part time job bagging groceries at Kroger that I decided to fly off on.  This was a job with a company that has sort of defined who I was for the better part of a decade.

The stress, the loss of sleep, and that big huge pit in my stomach leading up to dropping this news on my soon to be former boss was something that is hard to draw comparison to in my life.  I was a walking zombie for about a week when it clicked in my head that I was doing this.  Most people would wonder why I got so bent over leaving a job.  Especially when I had another lined up.  Becky says it is because I'm a very emotional person.  Which is probably true as I do tend to take a lot of things way too seriously.  However, I think a lot of it comes from the experience of being here.  I started doing this job when the company I now walk away from did not exist.  There was then a core group of us within another small local company working away until the leader spun out to start this place.  We came with and it sped on from there.  This was more than a job for a long time.  In the early early beginning before the doors opened I Cat5 cabled the whole office, helped setup furniture, ordered the servers and desktops, and stood back and soaked up the experience of a company coming together out of nothing.  We ran lean because we had to, which meant there was a lot of learning how to squeeze things out of open source software that we needed and couldn't afford to pay others for.  That meant learning enough about Cisco IOS to be dangerous and figuring out just different an AIX server is from that 486 running linux I had in my apartment.  There were a lot of long days and nights and I hope that when all of us involved look back years from now it was all worth it.

In the end I think it was the decision to step away now was the right one for all involved.  Not just for me, but also for the company as it heads into new directions.  The place simply outgrew me.  I'm cocky enough to say that on a technical level there isn't a problem here I cannot solve still.  However, the management required to keep in check a department and a company growing at this pace is something I was ill prepared for.  For a while I tried to give it a go, but continuously found myself drawn back to the nuts of bolts of using code to push bytes around in a way that makes things sing.  And in my opinion, if you aren't ready to give up the nerdy stuff between the hours of 8 and 5 you aren't ready to make the leap from coder to manager.  I wasn't ready.  And I've even been reading rands for year and bought his book. 

So now I continue my adventure I guess by heading over to Lucentglow as a programmer or whatever.  Whatever it is it will be nerdy and right up my alley.