Thursday, September 4, 2008

Job Change

...but not changing company. I'm still at Fortinet.

Now that I've finally figured out how to describe my job to non-technical people, I go and change teams. I'm moving from development (on the main product) to configuration management (covering all products).

Guess I better start working on how to explain that one to people. CM is such a niche, most IT people don't even seem to understand it. Hell, I probably don't even understand it entirely myself! Then there's the dirty looks I get from some developers. The kind I gave to developers moving to QA (yes, such strange people exist). Maybe it's the office, or maybe it's CM in general, but it's not seen as prestigious as being a hard-core C monkey. Maybe it's a mistake, maybe I'll move back to development after a year. Who knows.

Should be some moderately interesting times. Hopefully not in a bad way. With some luck, I'll have more energy for coding at the end of the day though. And that can't be a bad thing.

5 comments:

Anuj Agarwal said...

I think it would be better working in CM side becuase you will get more business knowledge too. :)

Ryan Graham said...

Business knowledge can be good or bad, depending on your goals. In the long run, it opens up more career options. The downside is it can look too fluffy when you're trying to focus on a technical career.

I'm still undecided.

Anuj Agarwal said...

I just see you have written this post almost a year ago, that means you must be working in that field for that much of time.

Ryan Graham said...

Yep. I quite like the job. I get a huge variety of problems to solve and I can solve them however I feel is best. I get to bounce between scripting, web apps, C/C++, etc. And my team is great. It ended up being a really good move.

Anuj Agarwal said...

Happy to know that, I am also trying to make such move which will be very difficult for me as there are not many opportunities here in my company right now. I don't know how it will turn around.
Keep Smiling.