Nathan's Occasional Blog

Now that it’s out in the open at work, I can comment that I’m leaving my current position to hop back into the consulting world.  The main driver is that I evaluated my current role and where I was headed and realized that I’m not pointing in the right direction.

Right now I’m a member of a small team for an organization the likes to outsource the tough stuff to vendors.  This is not a bad model, but it means that I’m becoming more of a project manager and “firefighter” than a technologist.  I’m not comfortable with that.

So I started looking around at what’s open and two very cool opportunities came my way.  BUT – they (and most everyone else) are looking for seasoned Cisco platform veterans and experience managing 100’s and 1000’s of servers.  We use Foundry Networks gear at my current gig, with the Cisco VoIP stuff outsourced.  Plus we’re in the 10’s of servers, with no signs that will ever really change (nor should it have to).

I finally accepted a position as an infrastructure consultant with a Northwest consulting group (will remain nameless for now) that I’m familiar with.  Familiar?  Hell, probably half the staff in the Bellevue office are folks I worked with (and more importantly enjoyed working with) in my last gig.  I’ll get a chance to not only work on internal infrastructure needs, but will be working on client hosting projects with multiple servers and multiple datacenters, etc.  This is the right direction for me career wise.

It took Alicea and I weeks – literally – to agonize over whether to make the switch or not, but we finally said yes and I notified my current boss a couple days ago.

Since then he’s been working on my job description so he can find & hire my clone.  🙂  He just passed it my way and it’s a solid 3 pages long.

Ho.  Lee.  Crap.  I can’t believe how much I do and have done in my current role, and how much experience and knowledge I really have.

Job postings intimidate me because I feel so meek compared to what they’re looking for.

I’m intimidated by my own job description.  😉