Time for Change

As some of you may have seen on my LinkedIn profile, I recently made a job change. This as always was a hard decision, as I really liked the folks I was working with at my old company and getting to work in Europe (Switzerland) was a great career experience.  Here’s a little bit of background.

Last December, my company was in the midst of a big hiring spree for our global SAP implementation–it was a big project, and it was obviously where most of our IT resources were going to be going for the next several years. It also meant leaving my comfort zone–databases, to be the Infrastructure lead for the project. I decided to do it–the ERP experience would be great, and my backup plan was that I would continue presenting on SQL, I could always go back to being a DBA.

The project kicked off in February, and one of key early decisions was to outsource the hosting of the Infrastructure–this would, in theory make my job easier, as it would limit me to connectivity, and relationship management activities. However, things didn’t work out well with the hosting (the vendor was awful, and we weren’t much better), so in April, when we were coming up against some project deadlines, I jetted off to Switzerland to build the development and sandbox environments with my consultant. The Swiss had some excess hardware, and the plan was for this to be a temporary environment until we got the hosting worked out–it wasn’t, and the VMs we built then, laid the groundwork for development.

From my perspective, this was good and bad at the same time. It tested every part of my technical skills, I did SQL, Oracle, Windows, Linux, VMWare and a bit of SAN. I even was fairly involved in the network and remote access pieces of the project. The bad side of this, was my team hadn’t expanded–it was two of us, and we were beginning to get overwhelmed with requests, both from the development team and the project management stuff I was having to do. (A common week was 6 hours of meetings a day, all while trying to work). After Switzerland (pt 1), I took a few days to go speak at SQL Rally, and relax a bit.

One interesting tidbit I didn’t mention, was that during my trip to Switzerland, it was announced that my company was being acquired by a much larger health care firm. I think I would be safe, but that’s always a big place for concern.

I was talking with some really smart folks John Sterrett (blog|twitter), Kevin Kline (blog|twitter), and Jen McCown (blog|twitter) at Rally, and they suggested I start looking for another role. I only applied to two jobs, and I heard back from both of them–one of them was at a very prominent company in the Philadelphia area, where a couple of my Microsoft friends had worked. I interviewed there in late May–everything went great, the process took forever, but their HR recruiting did an excellent job of staying touch with me, and letting me know that they were still interested.

The project progressed, things only got crazier. SAP has a crazy number of modules, each which have their own inter and cross dependencies, additionally there are a decent number of ancillary systems that also require support. I’m looking at you Business Objects Data Services.  So needless to say free time was at a premium. May-July consisted of a lot of 60 hour weeks–we finally decided to dump the hosting guys, and do it ourselves, so the end of July had another trip to Switzerland (this  would be our vacation for the year, it was fun), this time to build the QA environment.

The day before I left for Switzerland (and SQL Saturday Wheeling), I got a call from the big company I had interviewed with, with a great offer, pending a drug test (I passed, woo hoo!) . While, I was in Switzerland, I began hearing rumors that the SAP project may be cancelled, as the company is trying to save cash in advance of the merger. This along with a couple of other things that happened in the US during that trip, lead me to accept the offer. I do have to thank Erin Stellato (blog|twitter) and Karen Lopez (blog|twitter) for helping me with advice during that trip. Thanks ladies!!!

So, the epilogue of this story is that two days after I started my new role, the project was cancelled, and everyone was reassigned into either their old roles or something else. I felt pretty awful for my colleagues, but like I said on twitter, I felt like I hit the lottery.

Now, that I’m in a different role, you should see some more blogs here. Later this week, I’ll talk about how the community can help your career!