End of an Era - hanging up my Red Hat... another Renaissance, man...

I Remember - deadmau5 

Interestingly this song happened to play after I had accepted my offer and hung up the phone while driving to my hotel.

The second week of 2019, I was met with some rather daunting decisions I had to embrace.

I'll chronicle the details of the happenstance of me sitting in an Amazon office on a Tuesday shortly after the new year began... later.

To the cloud...
So, I went through "the loop" starting early on a Tuesday.  I was actually apprehensive after it was all done.  I didn't really feel stressed (or exhausted as I had heard I might feel).  The interview ended, much like it began - pleasant and jovial conversation, joking about a "day in the life" of an IT person.  The portion of the interview process where two folks were specifically supposed to challenge me in a particular way, felt quite comfortable and natural.  It's nice to legitimately just be myself in a situation where I am being scrutinized.

I had a bit of anxiety and stress going in to the interview - but it was misguided.  I could not let go of the feeling that I had not done anything impressive with technology in a while (and somehow the interview was going to focus on that - i.e. "tell me about something cool you have done recently").  At my current job I had earned a notable award (of some sort) for the past 3 years.  But, I had not "set the world on fire" with some cool implementation or exciting project - instead, I just did my job, to the best of my ability, and people noticed.

I am making it a point to transcribe the following now, a week before I leave Red Hat (and start my new gig) so that I can accurately convey my feelings as they are now.

See you later...
I anticipate I will never work for company (and team) as great as what I found at Red Hat.  There was ALWAYS a spirit of "we can improve this".  Which might actually seem like a negative thing - but, it wasn't.
"You struggled to find documents for XYZ?  Let's make sure the next person behind you doesn't have to suffer that same way."
"You want to explore being an X resource, instead of a Z resource?  Cool, let's figure out how to get you there."
There were other intangibles that I never had to invoke, personally, but I knew that essentially this place was much more than just a job.


So... you might be wondering:  why in the hell did I leave?  Good question - and the answers are just "coming to me"...

I think one thing I really struggled with (but did not realize) was the sense that I could never fully enable myself to be an "expert" on things I wanted, or needed, to really be an expert at.  I take a lot of pride in how much effort I put towards my work and quality of the deliverables I provide my customers (or team).  Red Hat was The Linux Company (tm)... no longer the case.  I was fine when Linux was the alpha and omega of my involvement.  I know Infrastructure, the problems, how to troubleshoot, how to improve and optimize,  blah, blah...   Red Hat discovered a while ago that they needed to be much... much.. more than just The Linux Company, and I think that was a wise and valid choice.  It has, and will, serve them well.  I think the issue is:  Linux is a solid Enterprise product.  Several other products are, as well.  However, Red Hat has also made the choice to pursue the emerging technologies - and that is where my consternation instantiates itself.  Frequent product release cycles, product renames, product rework (and abandonment of old methods)... became too daunting for me to manage.  I had become an expert of one of our products a while back - version 3.2 I believe - 2 years later, I no longer could recognize the product, could not adequately support it, but customers had the expectation that I could (either I forgotten what I had learned, or the product had changed significantly).  At times I felt like a charlatan, a fake... and ultimately... a fool.  I would literally lose sleep because of situations I had to face.

I have to point out:  I am just now coming to these conclusions... and summarizing my feelings about the past.  While it was all happening and I was "in the moment" I guess I just felt stressed, but never really tried to figure out why - or, perhaps I was in naive in concluding that it was my own deficiency or shortcoming.. and it was my "heavy lift" to resolve it.

If I was to try it all again, I would pick focus areas and stick to them.  Go really deep and narrow, rather than shallow and wide.  Both types of people have to exist, I think I just chose incorrectly.  My struggle is that I wanted to go wide... but not accept that I had to remain shallow based on that choice.


Amazon Interview Overview - The Bar Raiser