ace’s blog

Lost in the busyness of Aaron’s surgery, I resigned from my current employer, effective next Friday (July 25th). I will start my career as an independent consultant with a new client.

I’m excited to start a new chapter in my career, although I’m a bit nervous about having to find new contracts when current ones end. This is a very big deal for my family.

I will be doing 100% development, instead of the 5-10% I’m doing at my current employer. I’m always looking forward to learning new things and helping with the knowledge that I possess.

I had an interview yesterday for a 6 month contract. I really liked the facility and the work environment seemed very clean and nice. The people I interviewed with were very nice. The only problem I have with it, is the length of the contract. My biggest worry is about not being extended. Both of the people I spoke with spoke long-term so that made me feel a bit better, I just can’t shake the worry though. I thought I’d make a list of pro’s and con’s of my current and prospective contracts.

Current company pros

• Relatively stable – current contract expires in Sept 2008 but there is an extension in the hands of the client’s legal department awaiting approval that would expire in Sept 2010.
• I am allowed to work from home one day a week.
• Pay is good, benefits are decent and fairly inexpensive

Current company cons

• I’m fucking miserable here!
• I’m writing code about 10% of the time, the other 90% is spent analyzing production data and modifying it since it’s been screwed up by the system – basically, I feel like I work on a help desk.
• Being on-call. I have a pager that I have to “man” once every 10 days (approximately speaking); every 5th weekend, I’m on-call and basically can’t leave my house.
• I now how 3 time sheets to fill out! One of them, the newest, easily takes about 30mins/day to fill out.
• I’m not learning anything new here since I’m barely writing any code.
• I have to commute 62 miles (round trip) and spend about 45 minutes on I4 (with smooth traffic, no accidents).

Contract position pros

• Major pay increase, 66% from my current hourly rate – dollar for dollar, not including how much my benefits cost. Meri would pick up the benefits from working part-time at her job.
• 20 mile round trip from my house to client site.
• I would be writing code again!
• No more on-call support (and therefore no more feeling like I work on a help desk).

Contract position cons

• Only a guaranteed 6 month contract. The company has a very strong history of extending their contractors and eventually offering them full-time positions, but that is not guaranteed. The only guarantee is that I’ll have a paycheck for 6 months.

If the client decided not to renew the contract at the end of the 6 month period, they would have to let me know 45 days prior to the end of contract and vice versa if I decided not to stay with them either. If the contract expired in 6 months and was not renewed, we would be able to live on the “extra” money that I made from the hourly increase for about 4 months after the contract was over. That would give me 4 months to either look for another job or find another contract. If I was unable to find another full-time position somewhere else in Orlando. Moving out of Orlando is not an option. If I did have to start working other contracts, then I would potentially have to travel a lot.

So basically, I’m not sure what to do. Any ideas?

So this week at work, I was a lucky participant in the Disaster Recovery (DR) exercise. My involvement in the DR exercise this year (it is performed yearly) was that I sat in an un-cooled room with a lot of other lucky participants and we all did some things and everything generally went well.

Here is the DR in a nutshell – if primary server goes down, the users still need to be able to access the system and do their work with minimum downtime. This is accomplished (in very basic terms) by switching the IPs of the DNS entries of the servers. We were tasked with simulating a production failure and falling back to the backup servers.

That started Tuesday (6/3/2008) and I was on property overnight from 11pm Tuesday to 11am Wednesday. After that was completed and it was given the thumbs up, it was time to undo it – now we have to be back on the production server. That started at 11pm Wednesday night and lasted until 4am Thursday morning.

Now my sleep cycle is screwed up. Here’s to hoping that I won’t be here next year to experience that again!

Also, I have a phone interview for a contract job here in Orlando that I most likely won’t accept even if it’s offered to me. With the economy the way it is, I can’t put my family’s well-being at risk by taking a 6 month contract versus staying with my company with a 2 year contract. The money is a lot better but in taking the 6 month contract but what would I do in 6 months if the project actually completed on-time or the client just decided to cancel my contract? I’d be putting my family at risk if I couldn’t find another job or contract quickly.

If I am offered the contract, I’ll have to talk to Meri more about it.