So, it’s been a while since my last real blog post, nearly a year and a half! Where have I been? Well, quite a lot has happened since January 2019. I’m no longer working at Puppet, and I’m now a Senior Consultant with Telstra Purple But first I want to talk about how I ended up at Purple.
A story of discovery …
I had been going through a crisis-of-purpose for over a year. I really enjoyed working with my team members at Puppet. Even now I still keep in contact with them but something was missing.
I posed this question to a couple of mentors. Puppet is a good company, the people are nice, my career had never been as vibrant as the last three years and yet what was wrong? And after thinking and searching, and quite frankly a butt-load of time, it came down to many things, but a few felt more important than others:
My technical skills were increasing in areas that aren’t really in demand
My skills in Ruby were getting better and better. But there was a big problem. Even a simple search on job-seeker sites showed that very few people are looking for ruby programmers, particularly ones with no Ruby on Rails experience. But then I looked at what I considered my technical strengths: A Windows first infrastructure programmer, proficient in PowerShell and Ruby. In Open Source development environments.
There wasn’t much (to be honest, ANY) demand for this whole combination. Which lead me to a second realisation
My technical skills were decreasing in areas that are in demand
To be frank, my skills in cloud based infrastructure were pretty much non-existant. I did try to fix that in my time at Puppet, but for what-ever reasons which I won’t go into, I never managed to get roles which involved more of the Cloud. And the longer I stayed in my current role, the further behind I would be in that space. And this was confirmed emphatically by a failed job interview:
Purple wasn’t the first company I had tried to get a job at. HashiCorp was hiring a Developer Advocate for the first time in the Asia Pacific (APAC) Region. I was super excited about this opportunity as I had the chance to briefly meet the CEO (Mitchell Hashimoto) when he was here in Perth. I got through the first, second, third and even fourth round of interviews; only to be told no. Now, to HashiCorp’s credit they agreed to do a quick meeting with me as to why I didn’t succeed (Thankyou Rachel Shaw!). They thought I was a great candidate and loved my teaching style but … my lack of cloud skills stopped them saying Yes.
Clear evidence that my feelings were valid and should be a concern.
Working remote, with bad timezones, was probably taking a toll on me
I don’t consider myself an extrovert, but even introverts need social connection. I had been working remotely with really bad timezone overlaps for years now. And while I don’t think I was in a bad headspace, I was rarely in a great one. This was probably exacerbated but my crisis-of-purpose but still, it couldn’t be ignored. A more local timezone was required.
Taking action
So with that I went on the job search. I was being very particular about which companies to apply for. Because Puppet was still a good place to be. I could still make a difference to the lives of thousands of Puppet users with the work I was doing. So I had the benefit of time.
I knew a few people who worked at Telstra Purple (nee Readify) both from previous jobs and from various conferences. I respected these people and looked up to them (One of them is even a mentor of mine!) and looked like a great opportunity for me to spread my infrastructure wings and find the purpose I was looking for!
So after two months of informal chats, interviews and so on, I signed the contract, accepting a job offer at Telstra Purple as a Senior Consultant 🎉🎉
And then …
And between me signing the contract and actually starting the new job, COVID19 hit hard. I was to be onboarding to a new company, a new job, from the relative comfort of my home office.
Oh well. While I’m still lacking social connection, my timezones have improved VASTLY!
But a tip for new job seekers: DON’T ONBOARD DURING A PANDEMIC.
⭐ 1 out of 5 stars
Would not do again!
What about the Puppet VS Code extension?
I’m still actively involved in it, just not as much as I once was! I even have a 1.0 release coming up!
So what about this blog then? I want to start blogging again. Something I had forgotten about blogging is that’s a great way to cement my thoughts. And I have MANY of them going around in this head of mine. The other thing I forgot is blogs don’t have to be long. So look forward to more bitesize articles from me in the future!
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