Another Year, Another Job...

Happy New Year 2020!

I won't even pretend to say that I will be more diligent in contributing to this blog in 2020. But I hope I will. I miss it, and with the election coming up, there will be plenty that I want to share.

On the most recent news front for me is my employment. I started out 2019 working at DXC Technology as the Chief Technical Evangelist. It was a great job and I very much enjoyed the people that I worked with. About March of 2019, I was given an opportunity to scratch an item of of my professional bucket list: to join a company as their Chief Information Officer.  As much as I liked my bosses and coworkers at DXC, I had to take advantage of the opportunity.

It may have been the greatest professional mistake of my working career.

Don't misunderstand me: the job itself was pretty much exactly as I expected it to be - working with my department to further our technical capabilities for the company. And while that was great, the company's leadership and owners were not. I could even get past their antiquated management styles if it were not so blatantly obvious how little they cared for the employees. As much as I wanted to see it through, I decided in September that I had to leave for my physical and mental health.  And I am soooooo glad that I did.

There were several opportunities almost immediately with some of the biggest names out there, but none of them turned out to be the right fit. I must have had 20-30 interviews, all looking for something that wasn't quite the right thing for me, and I didn't want to force it. I was also blessed with having a skill set in which there is plenty of contract work available in security and IT audit, which I did for a very brief time.

At the end of October, my former boss at DXC put me in touch with a contact at a tiny little company called Google. They were looking for a Chief Evangelist for their cloud business specific to an enterprise partner - DXC! It was the perfect fit! The folks at Google thought so as well, and so I went to work for them - again as a contractor.  Awesome fit, awesome company (you can +1 me as someone that confirms how cool it is to work for Google) and a really great team. So why would I ever leave? As a contractor, there is no permanent placement, no time off or benefits, and that uneasy feeling that some corporate decision will be made in some office somewhere and everything will be over. In reality, this never happened, nor do I think it was going to happen at Google. Plus, the tech industry is almost always this way - which is why so many tech workers have so much turnaround on their resumes. But still that nagging feeling remained.

In December, a friend sent me the opportunity that I had been looking for - a Research Director at a technical analyst firm. The best way that I can describe it to someone outside of the industry: you have likely seen the commercials on TV for trucks and cars, the ones that they talk about the "most reliable" or "Best Truck of the Year": companies like Consumer Reports or JD Power. Well, this job would be leading the research on cybersecurity for a company focused on providing that insight to the tech industry.

After a lengthy interview process in which I interviewed them almost as much as they interviewed me (again, I wanted to be completely SURE about the job), they offered me the position and I gladly accepted. I will miss working with the folks at Google and their partners, but this is the job that was made for me. In fact, another close friend checked out the job description and joked with me whether or not I had wrote it myself to fit my resume (he is not wrong - it is almost an exact match).

So, if you made it this far, know that I am starting as the Research Director for Cybersecurity and Cloud at Enterprise Management Associates at the end of the month. I extremely excited to start this chapter in my professional career, and have every intention of doing it for a while!

Happy New Year, and hopefully I will be able to provide some greater updates in 2020!