The paper works arrived for the job, so it’s all a bit more official. It’s still not official official, because it’s dependent on references, and medical information being passed back and forth. But I now have a piece of paper telling me I got the job and how much they are going to pay me (although I’m due for a cost of living rise in April, before I even start!).

I still haven’t told everybody in work yet, mainly because it’s a Saturday, but also because I wanted to wait for the piece of paper. Mondays going to be fun though, almost first thing we have a project meeting, so I think I will use that as the opportunity to tell people. Stuart already knows so he will be prepared, and hopefully he has some ideas as to who will take over what.

I spent all of last week writing documentation. And I suspect I will spend most of the next 5 weeks doing the same, with all my holidays taken into account I should finish in around 5 weeks, get a fortnight off, and then start my new job beginning of May.

I’ve gotten over most of the initial shock and now I’m really looking forward to it and no doubt I will be chomping at the bit by may,

It’s all very well having freedom of speech, but you do have to think about the consequences.

One of the questions that have been floating around in my mind since I got this new job, is do I back publish all those blog posts where I rant about things at work? To give you a summary most of these are just me venting my frustrations, product X was a stupid mistake; we are wasting money on product Y because person Q has dodgy morals.

At the time, I decided not to publish these rants because they would no doubt land me in trouble, and they had already served there purpose getting it out of my system, but now I am free of the shackles of worrying about what people think (although references are still pending) do I publish and be dammed?

Well I’ve thought about it and while I’m free to publish, I’m not going to. Firstly why upset people? It’s all in the past now, me ranting about it won’t change that, it may bring things back in to peoples minds, it may even give people who didn’t already know some of the facts, something to get upset about, but overall it will upset people.

Secondly; what message does this send to my new bosses? Don’t tell me anything because I will remember it, write it down, and at sometime in the future, I will tell the world and it’s wife.

So on the whole I don’t think I will thank you.

like with all these things, change can be scary, and I would be lying if I wasn’t a bit daunted by changing jobs. Currently it’s the fear of the unknown that is the greatest.

I’m not scared that I’ll be ‘found out to be stupid’, because I’m quietly confident in my technical abilities, after all I’ve worked in quite a large IT department for over 6 years, it would be shocking if everybody else was stupid.

No I’m worried that the people there won’t like me, or that my desk will be horrible, and that I will be in a basement store cupboard, with nothing for company but the Steam Pipe distribution system.

So the conversation with Ruth goes something like this

“you do realize one thing about this new job and Microsoft outlook don’t you?”

look of extreme horror, as the realization dawns, that our installation of Microsoft office is tied to the university’s academic licenses.

“Oh, Kevin, call them back, and take it all back!”

Ruth lives by outlook, so it’s no surprise she’s a bit upset. Still I have been tasked with finding a suitable replacement. We’ve ruled out actually buying Microsoft office, it’s far to expensive (we could just wave goodbye to any pay increase), replacing word and the like should be easy enough. It’s just outlook and it’s calendar

Still Ruth pushed me to go for the job, so she can’t really blame me.

So, I’m leaving; first thing to do, tell the boss. Not officially mind, You don’t want to go around giving up one job before you know for sure that you’ve got another one to go to. But it seemed polite only to given him a heads up, about it all.

“I’ve got some news”

“Is it good news or bad news?”

“Well it’s bad news for you, it’s quite good news for me. I’ve been offered at job a Liverpool Direct working as a web developer”

“You’ve not accepted it have you?”

“Yes”

All in all I think he took it well. It’s not like it wasn’t on the cards, we’ve talked about how I was getting to the point where I couldn’t progress any further, with no posts above me becoming vacant, and how I was ‘Ambitious’ although where he got that from I have no idea.

We’ve decided that around two months, what with all the work I have to hand over and the fact I have 10′ish days holiday to take, means that I will be leaving work mid April and starting my new job first week of may. Only 29 more working days to go!

Gosh this is happening fast.

Well I’ve finally done it, after six years in my first job out of university I’m moving on.

I case you don’t know I work for Liverpool John Moores University, In the Computing and Information Services department, Although that is all about to change, I’m moving on to pastures new, I’ve just accepted a job with Liverpool City Council (hence the purple reference), working on the web side of things.

I’m not moving for the money, although there is a little bit more (not much at all believe me), neither am I moving for the google rank (search for Liverpool on Google, I’ll be moving from Number 5 to Number 2), I’m going for the job prospects.

After 6 years I’ve reached as far as I can go in the university, without people leaving or dying, and they are showing no signs of that. So I’m going, the job on the face of it is a sideways step, from one senior development position to another, but it’s a change, and a chance.

One to go further pay wise: I was at the top of scale, and now, I’ll be in the middle,

Two to get some more experience: It’s all very well working on all sorts of different projects at the uni but, it’s still the same job, and it limits what exactly you can work on, a new job will bring new challenges.

and Three more Job Prospects: Now I admit I don’t know this for sure, but I’m hoping the possibility of progression will be better in the Council, I have nothing to base this on, but it can’t be worse, currently I’m top of scale with all the project leaders above me digging in their heals until retirement (which is a long way of for most of them).

So that’s it really. I’m a bit scared, after all we fear change.

This week I will be mostly coding.

Work is a funny thing at the moment, I have a huge workload lined up, infact we have already pushed some things into next year. However because of budgets, hardware, and consultants, I’m currently in a little bit of a lull: we’re planning to change quite significantly how our Virtual Learning Environment (blackboard) integrates with our student system (oss), but before we can do that we have to get the new servers to run the new version. We are also getting our student system (oss again) to work better with our domain (Active Directory) but that is being done in conjunction with a consultant, who is in and out all the time, doing other things.

This coupled with a budgetary issues slowing other projects down (we are just working out what to spend our money on), means that I have taken it upon myself to rewrite some code this week. It’s not critical that it be redone, after all everything is currently working, but it’s a bit slow and the error messages aren’t great. I am usually a great believer in “if it ain’t broken…”, but I’ll probably not get a chance to look at this code* for another 18 months, So if I don’t do it now, I’ll just have to live with the slow naff messages, and that might drive me a bit mad.

*code, programming stuff that makes the computer do what you want; or a close approximation. For a real nerdy example of some code, take a look at these, maps of old atari game code. they’re quite cool.