Ok, I changed jobs again. Things were going really well at my old job (mentioned in my three year old journal entry...) I just needed to get out and do stuff from the ground up again. I haven't really done any system design in the past three years. I have been on 18 different projects in that time. Two of them used up a year and a half. All of those project with the exception of the very last one were following up other people's projects as they quit the company, got promoted or otherwise moved on. I was just done with cleaning up after everyone else. I want to start doing my own projects again. I guess you could say I am mature in my field at this time in my career.

Well, it's been three weeks and I am still employed. The new company is wounded by the weak economy, but in a much better position than my previous employer. I suppose the subject line is a bit dramatic, but you never really know what waters you are diving into when you change jobs.

It was kind of interesting going to the interview. For the first time, I was interviewing the company. I hadn't had an interview for well over ten years either, which made the whole thing seem very alien to me. I wasn't out of work. I didn't feel any less secure in my job than an did normally. I just really needed a change of environment. I felt as if I were drowning.

I am a controls engineer. What I do is design machine controls for industrial automation. I also program and debug the equipment after it has been built. At my previous position I was also the systems administrator for a rather crusty Dell 2300 server. It has been very reliable for the past five years, but you know that it's days are numbered. There were also the forty or so desktops and about a half dozen laptops. Most of the desktops were Dell's. On the low end, the GM had a P166. On the high end, mechanical engineering had shiny new Dell P4 2.53GHz, Ultra 160 SCSI machines with 1GB RAM. Those were nice. The rest of the company ran on a mix of old PII's and a few 500MHz PIII's. I was expected to keep this stuff running, while not allowing my regular job to fall behind. I just got tired of it all.