Thanks to the miracle of the "Old Goths Network" (in particular, a massively appreciated referral from _disdain_), come next Wednesday I will have a new job, for these folks: http://www.longviewcp.com / http://www.kyotoplanet.com

I'll be starting out on a 3-month contract-to-hire at a rate very similar to what I had been making at Lignum. I'm looking forward to not being broke anymore. All things together, for the last two years I have been making roughly half of what I had been making and it's been rough - not only in the pragmatic rent-and-bills sense, but also on my sense of self-worth.

This job also represents a much-needed career change. Rather than development, this will be a systems analyst job. I've been trying to make this transition for three years, since my job got eliminated by the Tolko take-over of Lignum/Riverside. I was far too tied to one technology for my livelihood and my role as a developer was at the mercy of incompetent, inexperienced, myopic, and in some cases downright unscrupulous systems analysts and administrators. Port Moody did nothing but drive that home. Being required to work with, develop for, and *shudder* further entrench outdated, inappropriate, or just plain broken technologies while playing the role of Cassandra and waiting to be blamed and forced to clean up the mess when the predictions inevitably came true is not a rewarding way to live.

Then there is the increasingly pervasive perception that's come with the "Web 2.0" world: if it shows up in a web browser whatever happens behind the scenes is inscrutable magic created long ago in faraway lands that never, ever requires upkeep, improvement, or even hardware to run on. All "the web guy" has to do to make the entire website in five minutes is automagically cut and paste from the Power Point presentation Dolores Umbridge from the Ministry of Magic showed to management eight years ago. Any fourteen-year-old could do it, obviously, since everyone knows every fourteen-year-old has a FaceBook page and a mySpace page. Why would a corporate website any different? The only reason we in management keep the web position at all is we are far, far to busy doing the real technically difficult stuff, like making more Power Point presentations and writing TPS reports in Word, to bother with that trivial web stuff. No one looks at the web page anyway.

The difference between a good job and a bad job comes down to a few simple things. I hate to use such buzzwords, but the difference between being proactive versus reactive is vital, as is having one's expertise and experience respected.

I'm going to have a fair amount of responsibility with this new job, and - especially at first - I'm going to be operating well outside of my comfort zone. While Lignum was pretty cutting edge with their systems, nothing really moved forward during the takeovers and I never really had much to do with the physical layer there. The last time I was getting my hands dirty with the physical layer was ten years ago  - which is a freaking eternity. And Port Moody was anywhere from five to ten years behind the times in all things. So I've got a minimum of four years of stagnation to overcome. That scares me a little. I've got a lot of learning and catching up to do.

However, having seen the levels of incompetence out there over and over in the last ten years, I know I'll do well. Competence is the new excellence. I'm confident in my ability to pick things up faster than the average bear and, more importantly when evaluating vendor marketing twaddle and consultant ass-covering, my bullshit detectors are in prime working order. I am also not stupid enough to pretend I know it all, which goes an amazingly long way toward not making really expensive mistakes.

It's exciting. This is positive change - the first positive change on the work front in three years. Which, of course, is another reason I am a bit nervous. I really need this to work out. My shit-job buffer is empty and I am getting shit-overflow errors.

And did I mention that the job is in the Terasen Building? That is exactly all of one block away. I never dreamt that I would wind up with a shorter commute than the six minutes it used to take me to get from door-to-desk at Lignum/Riverside. From stepping out the door to stepping off the elevator at this place is a matter of four minutes. With Port Moody it took me longer to walk to the bus stop / SkyTrain to start my hour long commute. Adding in the unnecessary lunch hour I was forced to take by the union I'd lose nine hours in my three-day work week, plus the time it would take to get over the ick-buildup once I got home. My evenings were shot. I had nothing left for anything worthwhile. As it was with Lignum, I'll be home early in the afternoon fuelled by a sense of accomplishment. I can't tell you how much I am looking forward to getting that back.

So enough speculation. Tune in next Wednesday to see how the first day goes.