New Year, New Job

It’s been an incredibly busy an interesting month for me. I’ve been on the lookout for a new job since the start of December. I was initially worried that the job market would be rather tight, given the large number of high profile banks and funds that have been going under, and the rest of the economy is battening down the hatches. Things turned out to be better than I expected (for me, at least)

I ended up with three job offers, and a couple of prospects that would probably have resulted in an offer if I hadn’t already accepted one of the offers…

• The first offer was from a web security company. I had a chat with these guys just before Christmas (hi Vijay!), and I really liked the team style. I must have made a good impression, because they got back to me very quickly with an offer. I’m sure I would have been perfectly happy to working there, as it looked like a great team to work with, and the technology they were developing looked very interesting. What it did force me to do is to explicitly list my criteria about what sort of job I would accept.
• The second offer was from a large investment bank. This was an opportunity to work directly with CruiseControl, with a series of plugs developed for internal use. I love CruiseControl – I tend to leave CC installations in most of the companies that I have worked at. Having a chance to work directly on CC was a big incentive for me, and it had a relatively short commute. This is the contract that I eventually did accept.
• The third offer was from an insurance company, from a friend I used to work with previously (hi Russ!). It came almost immediately after I got the second offer, and it put me in a huge bind – both jobs looked fantastic from my point of view. This one involved an initial bit of work to set up automated builds and continuous integration (work I love doing), with some follow on work involving web usability advice, software architecture and team mentoring – all of which sounded like a great way to start the year. Given that it was such a close tie between this contract and the previous one, I was an incredibly hard choice to make.
• One prospect looked very exciting to me is the team at youDevise. I had already met a couple of the people there through CITCON and other London events, so it already showed that we had a lot of agreement regarding development methodologies. Visiting their offices enforced this view, and has given me a big yearning to work with a team that uses agile methodologies thoroughly. I’ve promised to keep in touch, and might even make an appearance at one of their code dojos, which sound really cool.

So there it is – a chance to work on CruiseControl, which sounds a hell of a lot better than the company tax accounts I’ve been working on over the last few weeks.