THE NEGATIVE REACTION

Back in the big corporate world. .

After leaving FindLaw I then joined a small cloud services company in Minneapolis called Reside. Everything was going fine, then like a clipboard holding backup QB, I got a call from a recruiter I had spoken to shortly before taking my position at Reside. They needed an FED (front end developer) and the project which was put on hold, was now, back on. They sent me an offer and I quickly rejected it. I had a full time job, this was a contract position, and although the rate would have been a nice increase, I couldn't see myself leaving the security and stability of a full time for something that could last three months or a year. After I got off the phone, I thought that was the end of it

The second offer

the second time around, the rate went up another $6 per hour. Still a ton of money for doing some coding work, but still contract work. I politely told the recruiter, "no" and thought this would finally be it. They gave me their best offer, and I turned them down. I had a nice project I was working on, was happy, and didn't think too much more about it. Then things started to get really interesting.

The offer I couldn't refuse

Then came the "final" offer. A full time position, benefits and another $15K on top of what I was already making. This is when I needed to break out the matrix, start writing down pros and cons and completely over analyze this offer. I looked at everything, benefits, what I was doing now (cloud services) as opposed to what I loved doing (front end development). I felt like my HTML/CSS skills were starting to get rusty working on the salesforce.com platform and trying to deal with their marginal code. I also didn't like working with Eclipse and I really missed Dreamweaver with all my plugins. My speed came from utilizing Dreamweaver's auto-complete feature and several other plugins. I could cut and code a site in about 3 hours. Here I was toiling away on someone else's code, feeling like a hack getting it to work. Although this wasn't the deciding factor, it certainly weighed heavy on my mind. But there were other considerations.

Reside was in the process of completely taking off. The last three projects were HUGE ($400K plus). They were adding people at an astounding rate (15 people in the last month) and everybody was at full capacity for the rest of the year. In terms of potential, in terms of growing, and having a great spot in the company, Reside had it all. If you ever wanted to be in a company right when it was taking off like a rocket, well, Reside was it.

And now?

I exited Reside as gracefully as possible. It was tough to leave the company. I know they're going to be incredibly successful, it was hard to leave such a great situation. I started at Best Buy (usually referred to as "The Empire" in certain development circles) on Monday and after a couple days, I'm pretty happy already. Even though I don't have a laptop, monitor or a cubicle, I've found out some pretty cool things. First of all, the projects I'll be working on will play to my strengths (coding HTML and CSS quickly). I was told, we're going to be completely revamping all the best practices for coding, of which I will have a lot of input. One of the cool things is the developers have been fooling around with Zing Chart and have put together a pretty cool application to track the work we're doing. Lastly, the campus is stunning. The cafeteria is amazing, and there are several areas where you can relax and hang out, including an area with a pool table, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. For our first week, the team was divided up and we were given a task as a competition. We'll see how our presentation goes on Friday, but I think we're going to win pretty easily. In any case, I'm pretty happy and look forward to how the project is going to go the rest of the year.

Turn the page. .

Another page has turned and I'm pretty stoked about the future.



Train roll on, on down the line,
Won't you please take me far away?
Now I feel the wind blow outside my door,
Means I'm leaving my job behind.
Tuesday's gone with the wind.
My job's gone with the wind.


ok, so I changed the lyrics a little, but I think you get the message.