Times Are Changing…

Wow, it has been over a year since I wrote anything here and much has changed…

To begin the year, the family and I returned from visiting Carrie’s folks in Wisconsin to find out that Sun (my employer at the time) was gearing up for yet another set of layoffs.  This one was going to be bad for us (those of us who came to Sun via the acquisition of SeeBeyond).   Sun decided to defocus on the SOA and Integration technologies that we are all very passionate about.  Meaning that, most of us were being let go. 

To be honest, it was time.  Sun had really defocused us long before they communicated it to us.  Personally, I was heading up the RFID, the B2B, and MDM engineering teams.  We had to cut the RFID technology and most of the team last year and stopped all but a few efforts around the B2B space.   So, needless to say, I was not feeling like I was contributing all that much.

After I learned that I was “effected”, I found out my long time friend and colleague Gevik was also going to be out of a job.  Both Gev and I had always talked about starting our own business.  So, we took the opportunity and started RedSeal Solutions.  We worked hard trying to make it for four long and very fun months.  However, with the economy in the state that it is in and the pending Oracle acquisition of Sun this summer, we had a hard start!

We decided to hit the “pause” button on that and start the painful search for a full-time  job.  Wow, what a hard market.  I haven’t had to cold-interview for over 20 years and had forgotten how painful it is to have to talk about yourself!  Anyway, this is ongoing now and I have a lot of friends helping (and praying for) me!

So, now we’re up to today.  Being out of work puts a huge amount of stress on me and subsequently my family.  I am trying to be sensitive to this, but it is making home life stressful.

One of the positives about not having a hard schedule is that I am able to go with the COD High School Team down to Tecate and help mentor them and minister to our friends at a church down there.  I’ll write about this when I return.