End of One Era, Start of Another

But then in January, things changed.  We had been an independent software company for 20 years,  We had about 500 employees, meaning we were flexible and agile.  But in January our acquisition by OpenText was complete, which meant we were a small cog in a 9,000-person machine.  The culture changed for the worse, the processes changed for the worse, and my job security changed for the worse.  I had unbeatable job security prior to the acquisition.  But when you're part of a larger organization, especially after being acquired, you never know what might happen.  It's very common for a large company to buy a smaller company for their technology and immediately lay off the employees.  That didn't happen to us, as it's now been nine months since they bought us.  But often it's a year or maybe two after the aquisition that they've trained up their own employees, and then they lay off the people at the company that was bought.  You just never know.  Also, I'd only ever worked for this company (though now a division of the larger company).  I kind of wanted to learn something new and grow my knowledge of different technologies.  Also, our healthcare quality was going to go down starting this coming January when we were on the OpenText plan, and our costs were going to go up.

So combining all these things, I started listening to the recruiters/headhunters when they called.  I'd ingored their calls for years, because I knew there wasn't really anything that could draw me away from the great situation that I had at Actuate.  But now that things were changing, I owed it to myself to at least see what they had to say.  And recently, one called me that caught my attention.  I won't name it here, because (out of an abundance of caution) I don't mention my company name on this blog when I work for them (spoiler alert, I suppose).  They were a Unified Communications-as-a-Service company - basically VOIP for commercial use.  I was intrigued by what they had to say and by what they were offering me, so I went to interview with them.  After thinking about it, analyzing it, and praying about it, Meghan and I both came to the conclusion that it was the right time for me to make a move.  So I accepted their offer.  My last day at Actuate was this past Friday.  Over my last couple days, I took my office from being full of things to being sadly empty, as you can see in the above pictures.

So now I'm off to start a new venture.  This week is my first full week with my new job, and it's already in full swing, as I flew to Boston for the SE Bootcamp.  So far it's not as intense as the Actuate SE Bootcamp I attended in 2007, as this has no hands-on activities so far and is just PowerPoint.  But it's still been useful, and I'm excited to learn a lot as I get up to speed on my new job.  Will I stay at this company for 12.5 years?  Not likely, but either way it will be a great next step in my career.