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To get the bullet-points and the basic career history out of the way, feel free to jump to my resume

If you've read the resume, you've seen that I've lately been working as a manager of an abuse desk team and immediately prior to that I served that same team as a consultant, salesperson, evangelist, and tools developer (odd mix, huh?) Before that I spent about 4 years working as a Unix admin with a web support focus and have a rather varied background. If you are curious, you may be wondering what sort of job I'm looking for.

Hmmm. Good question.

I am very open to different sorts of jobs. I wouldn't mind greatly if I went back to system administration, but the high-volume narrow-scope assignments I had at DaimlerChrysler are NOT what I'm looking for. Prior to coming to DCX, I worked in smaller shops where the systems were less impressive, but I had far more responsibility and scope to my job. I miss that. At Finan, EAC, and Odyssey, I was the Internet guy, and in each case I filled the role of 'internal new technology consultant,' advising top management on their IT strategy. I missed that in my 2 positions at DCX, even though I acted in that capacity de facto for the groups I worked with. There were a handful of jobs at DCX with such a broader scope that were interesting to me, but when I left they were not available.

At MAPS I had 2 dream jobs, after a fashion. I telecommuted, I did work that I really believed in, I rarely ran into bureaucratic blockages, and I was listened to by the top person in the company who also happens to be someone I have respected for years before joining the company. However, MAPS suffered from its roots as a volunteer effort with a very thin infrastructure and a persistent inability to follow through on the abundance of great ideas generated by it staff of 26 brilliant people. That inability is largely why MAPS now has 12 people.

So, what I'm looking for is the right company, where I can make a real difference. This probably means:

I consider my greatest strengths to be my rapid self-teaching, my ability to communicate clearly and concisely on technical matters, and my ability to 'boil down' complicated topics to core concepts. In short, what I do best is analysis. Not necessarily analysis in the narrow jargon of IT, but in the more common meaning of figuring things out. This skill served me very well at MAPS and in my support roles at DCX. In addition, I re-entered formal 'management' at MAPS and while that can be very stressful (especially in a company on a path towards a 50% RIF) it was . I will always be grateful to MAPS top management (and my predecessor) for making me a Director against my own misgivings. In my last job hunt I would have avoided any job requiring me to supervise others, but that is no longer the case.

I still haven't answered the good question though. That's because I'm ruling very little out. It is probably helpful to note that the impetus to my seriously starting to look for a new job my last time out was a pair of ads I saw posted on a job website. One was for a "Digital Strategist" and the other for a "Technical Futurist." Both were described as advising upper management on technology issues, providing them with a technical eye on the world to help them make informed decisions about where to go with IT in their companies. I see such a role as my ideal job, even if it is unlikely that I will land such a position right now. I'll settle for something less, given the room the grow. So I'll do more sysadmin work if that's what I can get, but it needs to be someplace where I'm allowed to be more than just the guy who has root.

I'd also take a job developing software, although that's not as evident a skill on my resume. I've coded in C, C++, Perl, Pascal, and various flavors of Unix shell (I like ksh for any large shell scripts), and I've built web sites that are more than just HTML. I spent a significant part of my time at MAPS coding tools with a web interface for our dispersed team of abuse investigators and modifying a ticketing system written in Perl to fit the needs of an abuse desk. But the same caveat applies: I don't want to be one of a thousand faceless coders cranking out software in the back office of a car company. My goal is to be guiding technological strategy for my employer, so if I take a development job anywhere it has to have a clear communication channel from the code mill to upper management.

That's probably enough of a free-form essay on my career goals. I have also put up a 'virtual interview' page, so take a look if you want more depth on questions you might ask in an interview.