Old member recently returned.

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

So those of you who know and remember me I have spent a lot of time out of the forums, part of that is because my life over the last 18 months has changed somewhat dramatically.

I have been lucky to fall in to what is probably my ideal role, I spent a large part of the last 10 years working in the virtualisation arena, working with some very talented people using technology that still amazes me today. For some of that time I was an engineer, for the other times I have been a manager. I got made redundant 2 years ago, the best thing to happen to me in all honesty.

I spent a couple of months out of work (by choice), I spent time contracting spending alternate weeks in Spain and the UK and also spent time studying for my VCAP. During some of my downtime I let my skills go and actually really mucked up on a technical interview and that brought it back to me to up my game.

I then interviewed with my current company, interview went really well and I was employed in a senior engineering role with the view of team lead within a short period of time. Actually within the space of 3 months I was actually promoted 3 times (kinda, I was promoted to team lead after 3 weeks, then manager of the virtualisation team after 3 months (this being on a Friday) and then was also given the Storage team to manage on the following Monday). I have been the manager of the combined teams for the last year and it's been going really well, slight logistics issues with having a large distributed team spread across multiple time zones but as I only work from home it makes my life a lot easier.

One downside is there really is little separation between work / personal life, I jump on calls at 10pm at night sometimes, been woken up before 6am on other mornings because of incidents etc but being 100% with you I wouldn't have it any other way.

The only other major downside is that I don't get hands on any more, there really isn't much time for it and I had to laugh when my director asked me if I was still hands on (he's not and wasn't expecting me to be), my response being when??

Anyway, that's why I haven't been around much, work is hectic, it's often 50 - 60 hour weeks but I love it.

 

Good to see you back and glad it is going well!

 

Yeah, it's all too common when people work from home, one of my guys (UK based) is always online later than he should be.

It's gotten to the point now where my boss (US based) throws me off Webex chats and tells me to piss off because it's 10pm (admittedly it was an incident but ... well you get the idea).

 

Aww, nuts.
I thought of using the new members forum as a returning member, but decided against it.
I didn’t want to get in to trouble with the mods.

Um...