Time for a Restart
A few times in my career, I’ve decided to have a blog. This is another one of those times. It has been a while and my old Jekyll page was looking pretty dated. I deleted the old page and have imported all of my old posts, which aren’t very many, and I made the decision not to even read them to see if they had any value. The titles look pretty solid though!
Something different about this restart is that I am also restarting my career. This is not something I’ve ever really done before. To highlight what a departure restarting is for me, let me give a short history. I went to college without any plan, I decided in my second semester to major in philosophy, and made a mental plan to become a professor. While attending Boston College pursuing an M.A., I started looking into what the job landscape for philosophy professors was. What I found was that it is extremely bleak, something like 1% of doctorate holders were able to find a tenure-track position. So, when I was unable to pass the oral exam at the end of the course program, it was a pretty easy decision to change course. As you might guess, philosophy doesn’t directly track to many careers, so I did the easiest thing I could think of, and took a job where I had worked for a few months between graduating from NAU and finding, then starting a graduate program, Choice Hotels International (“Choice” from now on).
I re-joined Choice in their hotel support call center. At this point in the growth of the company, this department had a surprising amount of latitude to do technical work. I was able to apply pretty much anything I was able to learn to the job, so as I became more adept at database administration and programming, I was able to apply those to the problems at hand and eventually worked through the levels of the support department, then did an internship in the development group and then started my software engineering career.
All of this seemed to just happen, and I just kept getting more responsibility on higher profile projects. When I decided to leave, I pretty much took the first job offer I got that had higher pay and sounded interesting. I did that a couple of more times, sometimes internal to the company, sometimes external, but never with much intention. With my last position, I was determined to make a more positive switch after years of good pay, and mostly good economic choices, I had more room to risk some down time between jobs. So, in September 2024, I gave notice with no defined next step.
So, for the first time in my life, I am really looking for where I want to go. I considered some entrepreneurial ideas, but I’m finding I’m still quite risk averse and to put in as much work is required to maybe end up losing any investment along with not getting any salary is just too much for me. While I still plan to pursue that track while looking for my next gig, I can’t pull the trigger on making that my plan A.
I’ll be using this site to try to showcase my skills, share my thoughts on the journey, and try to think through what I am looking for in a job. I’ll probably throw in some trail running stories too, and maybe some homebrewing content, just for fun.