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  50. <h1 class="entry-title">Another Chapter Done</h1>
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  52. <time datetime="2011-06-23T00:00:00-05:00" pubdate data-updated="true">Jun 23<span>rd</span>, 2011</time>
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  55. <div class="entry-content"><p>I&rsquo;m a professional services consultant for a truly enormous corporation; for two more weeks.&nbsp; I turned in my two week notice today.&nbsp; I think I&rsquo;m all done working for big companies.&nbsp; I spent 8 years at a major retail chain doing web architecture, middleware and ops and the last 5 years consulting for the hosting, management and monitoring portion of a megacorp.&nbsp;</p>
  56. <p>When I took this job, it was with a group that had been a much smaller, recently acquired company.&nbsp; The feel was still pretty casual, annual reviews were barely a formality, attitudes were laid back and friendly and we rarely had to interact externally to our area. We had separate time tracking, VPN and client systems access. &nbsp;I was told that it still had a small-company feel and they were right mostly.&nbsp; I used a separate VPN for email, travel booking and expense reporting.&nbsp; I was sheltered from the corporation.&nbsp; All the engineers were.</p>
  57. <p>This isn&rsquo;t a rant about why corporations suck.&nbsp; They&rsquo;ve got a lot going for them.&nbsp; This one kept me in a 6 figure salary, great benefits and a 6% 401k match. I got paid even when I was benched, although that wasn&rsquo;t often.&nbsp; If you&rsquo;re traditionally ambitious(re: mgmt chain), I hear they&rsquo;re great for that too.&nbsp; If you&rsquo;re a slacker, you get a pass at a big company.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s hard to be noticed.</p>
  58. <p>Yeah.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s hard to be noticed.&nbsp; We&rsquo;ve been through several re-orgs since I was hired.&nbsp; ProServ was moved out of management and monitoring.&nbsp; The work started getting monotonous.&nbsp; Half of ProServ was re-orgd out of our group.&nbsp; We kept getting moved around.&nbsp; All our dedicated PMs were moved to a central PMO.&nbsp; The ProServ team was largely forgotten except by a few folks who managed our existing client base.&nbsp; Senior management probably forgot we existed.&nbsp;&nbsp; We haven&#8217;t had a team meeting in a year. My manager&#8217;s manager thinks I&#8217;m a man.</p>
  59. <p>About a year ago I realized I was bored. I realized that, if I had to architect one more WebSphere install, I might scream.&nbsp; No interesting work was coming in.&nbsp; Very little work at all was coming in, for that matter.&nbsp; I never lacked for work myself, but half my team was benched.&nbsp; I started thinking about quitting.&nbsp; Then a call came in.</p>
  60. <p>A friend working at one of our current clients was starting a continuous integration project.&nbsp; He used to work for the same megacorp and we&rsquo;d been friends for years.&nbsp;&nbsp; The work was outside my immediate realm of experience.&nbsp; Learn Ruby, learn a new configuration management tool called Chef and start figuring out how to automate the existing infrastructure at this client.&nbsp; I was skeptical.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m pretty smart but I have a realistic assessment of my own abilities and I had no coding experience beyond some bash and python scripting.</p>
  61. <p>So I dug in.&nbsp; I learned some Ruby syntax.&nbsp; I started figuring out Chef.&nbsp; It was a steep curve but it was so interesting, fun and exciting that I was thrilled with work for the first time in ages.&nbsp; I learned the term &ldquo;devops.&rdquo;&nbsp; I read a bunch of blogs.&nbsp; I got really excited, in that born again annoying kind of way.&nbsp; I knew it too and pretty much kept it to myself, although sometimes at parties, I started gushing if someone asked about work.&nbsp;</p>
  62. <p>I&rsquo;ve spent the last year doing some awesome work.&nbsp; The client experience has been incredible.&nbsp; The dev teams we&rsquo;re working next to are practicing agile concepts.&nbsp; We work in a large open space, with pairing monitors everywhere and you can&#8217;t throw a pen without hitting corporate issue macs.&nbsp; The dev teams pair and we sometimes cross-team pair on things.&nbsp; Our team has a 10 min standup every morning.&nbsp; We track stories in a tool and showcase at our weekly planning (usually code review since Chef configs aren&rsquo;t really &ldquo;featurable&rdquo;).&nbsp; We&rsquo;re getting monitors soon and trying to figure out how to hook Chef into graphite to start metricizing.</p>
  63. <p>Something that really resonated with me at Velocity on the last day was Adam Jacobs who said, &ldquo;You can tell the people who are doing devops right because they&rsquo;re HAPPY all the time.&rdquo;&nbsp; That&rsquo;s what it&rsquo;s been like.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve never enjoyed anything so much as I have this last year.</p>
  64. <p>Unfortunately, working for a megacorp has intruded on my professional happiness too many times this year for me to ignore it any longer.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve known for a few months that this was coming.&nbsp; The project work I&rsquo;ve been doing for the last year has been awesome and I don&rsquo;t want to leave it behind.&nbsp; Growing my Ruby development skills has been super fun and a big challenge.&nbsp; I hope to do more of that going forward and am planning to work on my own projects as well.&nbsp;</p>
  65. <p>In the meantime, I&rsquo;m going to take a little time off, ride my bike, write some code, evaluate my options and see what&rsquo;s out there for me.</p>
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  69. <span class="byline author vcard">Posted by <span class="fn">Sascha Bates</span></span>
  70. <time datetime="2011-06-23T00:00:00-05:00" pubdate data-updated="true">Jun 23<span>rd</span>, 2011</time>
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