If you read my bio, you can find out that I come from Europe. In that part of the world, if you hop in a car and drive in any direction, you will enter another country that same day. In contrast, you can drive thousands of miles, cross three time zones and many different geographic and climate regions and still be in the USA. Many people there had rich lives doing very different things while never really needing their passport.
I feel the same about career change. In Silicon Valley, people normally switch companies when they feel like doing something different, because companies are small, young and focused. But when you work for a company as large and multi-faceted as IBM, you have the other option – to change what you are working on without having to go through the new employee orientation again and learn where coffee is. And that is exactly what I am doing.
I am moving on to a new job, from DevOps to Data Analytics. I don’t need to spend a lot of time making a case why cloud data and analytics is currently exploding as an area. The amount of data we are amassing is unprecedented and relentlessly growing. With the new data that IoT devices will bring to the table in the coming years, we have a dire need to collect, store and most importantly, make some sense of it all, otherwise what’s the point?
Of course, I was not looking for an entirely clean start. I spent more than a year blogging about Node.js, micro-services, message brokers, authentication, UI composition. I simply intend to employ all the great stuff I have carefully curated for presenting and visualizing the data and the results of data analytics in the cloud. All the lessons of clustering, high availability, caching and DevOps automation will also come in handy in the new job. In other words, what is changing is ‘What’ but not the ‘How’ part of the equation.
Come join me
In the book ‘Being Geek’ by Michael Loop (aka Rands in Repose), the following section in the chapter ‘The Deliberate Career’ best describes my next adventure:
A start-up is more likely to be in a state where it’s hiring lots of people, aggressively attacking new problems, and having a sense of urgency. Still, you can find the same attributes in a large company in a specific group that has been tasked with the new and sexy. This hybrid might be the best of both worlds – the urgency of a start-up supported by the stability of an established company.
As far as large companies go, there is rarely something as thrilling and filled with opportunities as being at the beginning of a 1.0 version of a product or service. And to further underline the similarity, we would not be a start-up (even in an established company) if we were not aggressively hiring.
If you live in Toronto, have enjoyed my blog so far (or are intrigued by this post and binge-read it backwards), and like the following areas:
- Node.js micro-services
- Dust.js
- HTML5/CSS3
- Angular, Backbone, React, Web Components
- Message brokers
- REST APIs
- Web sockets
come and join the team I am building. Drop me an email, tweet me a message, send me a carrier pigeon – whichever way you choose to reach me, but remember: we have a sense of urgency, so don’t take too long. This stuff will not get built on its own.
© Dejan Glozic, 2015
Dejan Glozic 
Leave a Reply