Day 44: Employed Once More!

After 3 1/2 months of unemployment, during which I submitted countless job applications, became a regular on LinkedIn, learned the routines of the Texas Unemployment Benefits system, and sat through numerous interviews, I’m excited to report that I have a new job!

In a couple of weeks I will be starting at Nvidia as a Senior Python Developer, working on the tools for their GPU cloud. I’ve met the other people on my team during the video interview process, and they all seem like a bright bunch, so I can’t wait to start working with them!

It’s been difficult these last few months. It started with the pandemic and subsequent lockdown, which has affected everyone. Then came the layoff, with DataRobot letting 25% of its workforce go, including yours truly. It really wasn’t much consolation that I was only 1 of the 40 million or so in the US who lost their job in those few weeks – it still hurt.

Still, I have had it better than most. My wife still had her job, which was super-important financially. We also had some savings, so we weren’t living paycheck-to-paycheck like so many Americans have to. And it did give me some free time to work on my photoviewer software, and practice my newly-discovered sport of disc golf. It also gave me the chance to perfect my sourdough bread technique (yeah, I know – how cliché!). But there is only so much to do when largely confined to the house.

Which is why I started this daily writing exercise. Not just to fill the time, but to get down some of the thoughts that have been in my head for a while, and polish my rusty writing skills. And while it’s been difficult to always find something to write about, I have noticed that writing itself is feeling more fluid.

I will continue this daily project until I start the job on July 20. After that, I will continue to write, but just not on a daily basis. Going through this exercise has helped me enjoy writing more, and improved my ability to let a piece out into the wild without first obsessing with endless editing. That is probably the best thing I’ve gotten out of it.

Writing Again

Today marks 2 months since I was laid off from my job at DataRobot. It was part of a 25% reduction that was made in anticipation of the business slump from the COVID-19 pandemic, and having just been there for 6 months, I was one of the ones let go.

I have spent the last two months like most of you largely confined to my home, with only an occasional trip to the grocery store. Since I was home with all this newfound free time on my hands, I decided to work on a lot of projects that I’ve had to put off. Now that those are largely complete, I need to find a new outlet to occupy my time. So today I’m going to start on a program of writing every day; you’re reading the first entry.

Not to brag, but I’ve always been pretty good writer. The biggest problem that I have is perfectionism: I want to edit/rewrite until it can’t be tweaked any more. As an example, I was stuck for 10 minutes just coming up with a title for this post! I mentioned this tendency in the very first post of this blog: I was about to travel to Australia, and wanted to have a way to record my impressions. I had hardly ever traveled outside the US, so this was a really big deal for me.

I kept it up for a short while, but soon fell back into my old ways: starting a post, and then abandoning it because it didn’t feel good enough. When I joined IBM in 2014 as an OpenStack developer, part of my role was to be outspoken, and writing blog posts was one way to do that. So for a while I was posting fairly regularly. This time, though, it was the blowback from those posts that caused me to lose interest in writing. You see, the OpenStack developer hierarchy is designed to discourage change and alternate approaches, both of which were the frequent topics of my posts. It discouraged me because I was publicly criticized by many of the “core” developers, who seemed to take my ideas as threats to the way they were doing things. It was even more discouraging that I received at least as much private thanks and praise from others, all of whom were not comfortable expressing support publicly, less they lose political capital with the core developers. I have a post I started and never finished on this toxic atmosphere; maybe one of these days I’ll finish it as part of this new effort.

So I’m now going to reiterate my initial pledge: I will limit myself to a one edit rule: after the post is written, I’ll go over it once for typos, etc., and then publish it. I’m also setting a minimum of 30 minutes per day to write, and to publish it no matter how good I feel it is. There will be no set topic; one day it may be my thoughts on photographic composition, the next may be a tirade about the latest Trump atrocity. But I do hope that what I write is as interesting for you to read as it is for me to go through the process of writing.

Moving On

It’s been a great run, but my days in the OpenStack world are coming to an end. As some of you know already, I have accepted an offer to work for DataRobot. I only know bits and pieces of what I will be working on there, but one thing’s for sure: it won’t be on OpenStack. And that’s OK with me, as I’ve been working on OpenStack in one form or another for 10 years now.

Wait a moment, you say – OpenStack is only 9 years old! Well, before the OpenStack project was started, I worked on Swift briefly when it was an internal, proprietary project at Rackspace. After that I switched to the Cloud Servers team, which was the team that started Nova with NASA. So yeah, it’s been a full decade. That’s a loooonnnnggg time to be on any development project!

So the feelings of burnout combined with the shift away from OpenStack within IBM made moving to DataRobot a very attractive option. And after having done several video interviews with the people there and getting their impression of life at DataRobot, I’m that much more excited to be joining that team. I’m sure that for the first few months it will be like drinking from the proverbial fire hose, and that’s perfectly fine by me. It’s been much too long since I’ve pushed the reset button for my career.

Over these past 10 years I have made many professional contacts, some of whom I consider true friends. I will miss the OpenStack community, and I hope to run into many of you at future tech events – PyCon, anyone?