A month or so ago I did something a bit crazy… twice. But let’s back up a bit first.

For the last 3.5 years I’ve been working as a Solutions Architect for Novell, a job which has:

• trusted me with working from home, even before I’d proved myself,
• introduced me to some great colleagues and new friends (Novell is full of highly motivated and talented people),
• pushed me outside my comfort zone many times (and in case it’s not obvious, that is a very good thing), including forcing me to confront and completely overcome my phobia of public speaking,
• taught me a whole range of technical and “soft” skills,
• given me the opportunity to work on projects with some of the finest minds in the industry and stay at the cutting edge of technology,
• given me the opportunity to meet, learn from, and help countless client customers and partners, both existing and prospective,
• rewarded me for innovation (I co-filed two patents),
• taught me how to understand, and where possible sidestep people politics (although politics are inevitable in any large corporation, Novell is relatively free of it and even the CxOs at the top are very down-to-earth, approachable people)
• and probably many other things I missed.

Despite all that, a while ago I started feeling that I needed a fresh challenge. And the feeling wouldn’t go away – in fact it kept growing. I started thinking about what to do, and as often happens when you open your mind to possibilities, a very promising new opportunity presented itself to me out of the blue, in the form of a job at another company.

So we come back to the crazy thing. I interviewed for this job, found out that it was certainly challenging role, and had phenomenal opportunities for career growth and networking, got an offer, and after much stress and agonizing, turned it down.

Two weeks later, almost exactly the same thing happened with another company.

Especially in today’s economy, what the hell was I doing turning down two great job offers? Well, I was taking a gamble based on the possibility of being offered something new at Novell which sounded more exciting than either of those.

Let’s back up again, this time much further. When I was about 8, I first discovered computers and quickly realised that they presented a whole new world where you could invent all kinds of wonderful new creations and you were pretty much limited only by your imagination. Well, this was quite a long time ago, so admittedly having only 1 kilobyte of memory and a cassette tape recorder which only worked once every 10 times for storing your programs on was a bit of a limit too, but hopefully you get the point. I realised that I liked making stuff.

This passion has stayed with me my whole life – it sort of went into hibernation for two amazing years at music college, although even then you could argue I was making stuff (i.e. music). And it’s why I turned down both those two jobs – even though they were great, they didn’t present immediate chances to create, and my instinct was telling me that’s what I needed.

So the great news I received earlier today is that the gamble paid off, and I have been formally offered a job as a Software Engineer Consultant, joining an extremely talented team based mainly in Santa Cruz in California. This is getting scarily close to being a dream job! I remember years ago voluntarily pulling 100 hour weeks at guideguide despite terrible pay, simply because I loved it so much – and I think this will give me the same kind of rush 🙂

For those wondering whether I’ll be relocating to California: for now, I’ll still be officially working from home here in London, but I’m crossing fingers for a business trip across the pond to meet the new team soon 😉 I hear it’s a beautiful stretch of coastline, and would be triathlon training heaven …

One Response to “going back to my roots”

1. Helena Biggs says:

   September 5, 2009 at 5:34 pm

   Hi Adam, cool, this news does have the same tone as the last blog I wrote. Brilliant.
   This emphasizes to me the importance of following the dream one has to make a living out of doing something one loves. Observing what it is that makes one feel happy and not stopping until you reach it. Of course there will always be something else that catches out attention after one dream is fulfilled, but with the experience of having worked and achieved it, our imagination will not allow the limits that we so to easily put upon ourselves and we will go on to create more!

   Reply