poltr1 | The next job... and the previous job...

In late January, I was contact by a recruiter for a job here in Dayton. I submitted my resume, and had a phone interview on Thursday, February 21. Lo and behold, one of the interviewers was Ed, a man I used to work with at previous job (BAE Systems, from May '06 through May '08.) He is now a project manager for this new company. That afternoon, they gave me a verbal offer.

But I kept it under my hat for a while. I've been in this situation before, where I was offered a job, and the job offer was later withdrawn. (This was two years ago, for a contractor job with the US Army Human Resources Command in Fort Knox, KY. I won't say on LJ why this happened. But some of you may already know that story.)

This past Tuesday, I had lunch with Ed. And while he was contacting his people on his Blackberry, I got the written job offer I was waiting on. Why the long delay? Because they were laying off people elsewhere within the company, and wanted to bring me aboard as cleanly, legally, and ethically as possible. But by waiting three weeks, my initial period was extended from 3 months to 6 months. I'll be starting as a 1099er, but compensated accordingly. Eventually down the line, is a strong possibility that I'd be brought on as a permanent employee -- W-2, benefits, etc.

So, what will I be doing? The company is partnered with ResQSoft, which has a suite of software engineering tools, collectively called Engineer, which is used to perform automated software conversions from legacy languages (e.g. COBOL) to modern languages (e.g. Java).

When do I start? This coming Monday. Our office is still being constructed. It will be in the Tech Town district of Dayton, just east
of Downtown. In the meantime, I'll be working from home. (And just as well; we have a major winter storm coming in on Sunday night.)

What happened with the previous job? I don't think I mentioned that gig here at all, due to the nature of the work. I was working on an information security tool for GE's Technology Services Group (TSG), a joint venture between their Energy and Aviation businesses. The first version of the tool was written in Perl. I was converting it to Python, and storing the data into objects for later, deeper analysis. Energy split up into three business units, and my GE point of contact went from TSG to one of those new units, leaving my project behind for someone else to pick up. And no one else picked it up. So at the end of December, which was also the end of GE's fiscal year, my job ended.