Transitioning

From December 2021 through February 2022 I have been busy looking for a new job after being laid off from PTC.

My search ended happily when I joined Devo Technologies as Principal Developer on February 14. They are a SEIM unicorn (cyber security). The front end challenge is very similar to that of IoT: ingest lots of data, make sense of it, display what seems important so that someone can take action. Lots of room for AI and ML enhancements.

I will always be grateful to Axeda (PTC bought Axeda in 2014) where I started off as a UI developer developing Adobe Flex front ends when anyone willing to develop Flash-based software were in short supply. I was banking on it being my opportunity to leave Flash behind too, and sure enough, after a few months we had to switch gears to HTML/Javascript/CSS.

I am grateful to PTC for giving me that unpleasant push. The PTC acquisition led to an opportunity to dive into enterprise-level front end development, but became somewhat stagnant after fixing up most of Thingworx Mashup Builder. So now I get to enjoy building on that experience at my new job. It also forced me to assess what I really wanted to do next and review my body of work to that end.

It felt good to go through an entire job search campaign and come out the other end with multiple interesting opportunities to choose from. All of the good opportunities came through recruiters. Applying to companies through their “working here” intake systems led nowhere.

The best approach to job seeking remains putting yourself out there, but allowing yourself to be pursued. I didn’t think this was going to be as important in a job-seekers market, but in truth it was just as important. For me it meant putting the “Looking for Work” sticker on my LinkedIn profile, while using Calendly to drop a hint that I was in play due to all the meetings I was booking.