YES !

I got the job. I'll be transferring to my new department at the end of January.

When I first joined my current team, I had high hopes and lofty dreams. The product was one that promised to streamline multi-agency emergency response, solving the consistent problem of communications between various teams with disparate radio equipment. I was beyond stoked at the opportunity to combine my desire to help others and give to the community with my career in technology. At the time, it seemed too good to be true.

Unfortunately, it was too good to be true. So now, I am moving on.

The new group is Network Operations, with which I am very familiar, having spent 4 years in a similar environment in Toronto. Although my specific technical knowledge has eroded over the last seven years, I have already begun to ramp up again. The team members that I have met are wonderful, and the boss is someone for whom I have a great amount of respect. I am confident that I have made the right move, not only for my career, but for my life.

Never again will I work for a sweatshop, no matter how lucrative or pride-inducing the work may be. That I have promised myself.

My focus used to be on my career, forsaking all others. Now, it is on my family. Where it should be.

Rhetorical Question

It's my birthday today. I'm at work, sitting in an all-hands meeting for a team I might be transferring out of soon.

I could have gone for lunch with my friends. But I'm here, listening to droning managers and eating cardboard pizza.

What the hell is wrong with me ?

It's a misplaced sense of duty, that which has kept me working this sweatshop job for far too long, tolerating the insufferable cut-throat business tactics that left us working insane hours to meet an impossible schedule that could never be slipped under any circumstance. I'm not sure why I have such a sense of obligation to a team that has systematically chewed up its software testers and spit them out, but that is my life as it is right now.

I find out within the next few days if I have been granted my internal transfer.

Perhaps, this new group will be deserving of my loyalty and dedication. I sincerely hope so.