Another chapter after 17 years

 Saturday, February 7, 2015
On to new things!
After 17 years, I have decided to resign my position at Level (3). 17 years. That's a lifetime in IT. I started at a small telecom located in Southfield, MI and ended up at an international telecom with a headquarters in Broomfield.
What a ride
I started as a desktop tech, within a half-year I was doing servers. Ultimately Allnet was purchased by Frontier, Frontier by Global Crossing and then the bottom fell out. For the remaining years until about last year, I worked for a company that was effectively a start-up in a very competitive sector. Layoffs every year were normal while Global Crossing struggled (and ultimately succeeded) with survival. Level 3 purchased Global Crossing in 2011. For 15 of those 17 years, I rode the wave down and for the last two I've been riding it back up. It was strange working for a company that was not operating in survival mode.
It was 17 years for me, but nearly every year I was given a new position, more responsibility and new and interesting projects. Mix in the fact that I was working amongst, what I considered to be, some of the best people in our industry.
Onto Development
I'd always been a programmer. I'm not sure why I took the ops route originally, but within two years I was writing code that was changing the way our employees worked and I knew right away that this is what I was made to do. I love programming...love it. Over the years I was given the freedom to code, experiment and learn. I quickly jumped on the C# bandwagon, missing the days of hacking about in C and Pascal/Delphi and fell in love. And I learned...
So why now?
After 17 years, I've discovered that it's time for me to move on. During my time at Level 3, I had the privilege of working on some special projects involving Lync and Office Communications Server. This was my first exposure to an API that I couldn't simply Bing (there's one for you, MS) a million answers from people who had just learned the API. The APIs I was working with were pre-release, but after release the situation wasn't much better. For some reason, I enjoyed this immensely!
What now?
I had sent my resume out to Modality, a Microsoft Partner and a company with a very successful business in the Lync space, earlier last year. This wasn't unusual for me. If someone mentioned a job that sounded interesting to me, I usually prepped my resume, took and interview and turned down the job. It's happened so many times over the years that I almost expected to make the same decision when Modality had a position available to me. After talking to the guys over there, much to my own surprise, my mind was made up.
I'll be a US based, "work from home" (I prefer remote) employee working for a company that sells services and software for an application that, since 2008, has been the reason I could work effectively as a remote employee for Global Crossing and ultimately Level 3. Being a part of a company that was an early adopter--eliminating all phones on PCs and replacing them with USB headsets and speakerphones was far less of an adjustment than anyone could imagine---was great for me. The quality and effectiveness of audio conferences suddenly made it possible to have a workforce that was distributed far and wide without losing much other than water-cooler conversation.
Finally
Farewell, my Level 3 coworkers and friends! You are among the best and many thanks for the help, support and just-plain-fun you've given me over the last 17 years.

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