Well, my friends, sometimes you just don't see this stuff coming. I moved across the country, we sold our house, put our kids in a different school, all for this state level job I was so excited about in California. Well, that just came to an end this morning. As it turns out, California has a very strict telecommute policy, which will not allow anyone under any circumstances to work remotely from any other place other than their one 'designated remote office location.' Of course, if they had told me that up front, I wouldn't have gone through all the trouble, but somehow it only came up after a full month of work. A sort of offhand, Oh, just sign this telecommute document when you get a moment... and to my horror, it made my second remote location completely untenable. So that's it. I gave them my resignation, and for all of the sacrifices I made to be here, giving up time with my young children is just not something I am willing to negotiate. So that was an easy decision, but it puts me in a position that I have not been in, really ever since my 20s. I honestly don't know how easy it will be to get hired again now that I have this 'blemish' on my résumé, and I am taking a long and hard look at my expenses, and my daily routine, in order to figure out the best new path forward.

Ideally some start-up - like I found with GMG 2 decades ago - needs a technical polymath to steer the ship from zero to hero, & will somehow magically locate me on the west coast, but I fear that might take some time, if it ever happens, mostly because recruiting now just seems so hit or miss, it's barely worth the trouble. I still have my consulting business, do I just jump back in over there and hope to land some solid clients relatively quickly? Do I spend a little time grabbing a few new certifications to broaden the job search a little bit? Do I just go all in with a headhunter somewhere? Or maybe, do I spend some time evaluating "life in my 50s," to see if there is perhaps an entirely new direction to go in? My daughter asked me how does this make me feel, and I came up with two main emotions. One is, of course, betrayal, because I feel like my new employer should have at least tried to fight to keep me: it seems so logical that taking away time with someone's family would be just a measure of last resort instead of the standard policy. The other was excitement.

I was certainly already delivering on a number of fronts: both in terms of preparing better documentation for the processes that I was helping with, as well as, and this is my favorite one, creating a standard workflow for addressing security 'scans' from Qualys. As it turns out, the day before I was forced to resign, we had our very first clean scan for all of the Dev servers, and I was about to roll out my approach for staging -- which was to push all of the security updates into a single power shell script that could be run on the target devices. I really like this stuff. Process optimization is perhaps my favorite thing with regard to technology.

But even though I am as technically savvy as I've ever been in my life, with decades of experience covering Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, react, iOS, web, big data, & analysis, not to mention the nuts and bolts of Linux and network programming, a strong grasp of crypto technologies and generative AI, that does not mean in any way, that it will be easy or even possible to share my talents with an employer. I heard from someone last week, and have been ghosted since, but of course, that itself is not of note. The thing I find interesting is that I was given an aptitude test, and a personality test, and I know I crushed both of them. Then, why would you ghost me, if you have a literal proof of both my genius level and my commitment to excellence?

At this point I'm just ready to take some period of time to decompress, and get back to writing, which is really what I always do in times of flux. I'm grateful to have time with the kids again. I'm grateful that my family is totally flourishing in southern Oregon and that I am able to redirect my energy over there. There is no doubt in my mind that some opportunity will present itself over the next weeks and months, and allow me to begin the next chapter of my life with a stable income, surrounded by my loving family.

I'm sorry, Sacramento, I guess it just wasn't meant to be. Anyone need a sublet?