I’m now part of 11.5% of all California workers looking for work. My organization decided strategically that they didn’t want to do in-house development, hence they didn’t need a development manager. I just wish I had gotten a longer chance to show the significant quality and cost benefits of maintaining a development team in-house.
There is shock as you realize your routine has changed. It settles down after a few days. Next came the silver lining that comes with this sort of change:
- Doing coding katas every morning to tighten up my programming chops. I’m alternating between doing solutions in Ruby, Java, and Groovy.
- Looking at options to do something I’ve been passionate about like Agile coaching, QA management, or old fashioned professional services.
- Attending some conferences and user groups in the Bay area since I have some travel time.
- Reviewing some open source projects I always wanted to contribute to.
- Catching up with friends in Sacramento over lunch.
- Hanging out with my two daughters including picking them up on bikes last week.
Sacramento isn’t the biggest tech market and it’s home to the state of California government and their massive budget issues, but I’m confident I’ll find a good opportunity.