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is a Professional Geek for Microsoft Australia. More info lives underneath the About Box...

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Let the New Journey Begin

By Nick Hodge | January 29, 2007

So, I reached 7 months before my feet star­ted itch­ing. Or was it that my brain was itch­ing? Either way, I star­ted look­ing ser­i­ously at con­trib­ut­ing to the cor­por­ate world again.

After resign­ing from my pre­vi­ous job, it was clear that I was not going to do the exact same role. There were a couple of head-hunter calls, and some pro­jects related to chan­nel sales where I pur­posely said a firm no. Doing exactly the same type of thing would have prob­ably been the easi­est route to boot loads of cash, but the shortest road to insan­ity. Just put­ting the new cover pages on TPS reports was not a part of the ori­ginal game plan.

Work­ing for your­self, build­ing a busi­ness and look­ing for pro­jects to keep some income rolling in, is a tough task. Whilst self employ­ment has it many bene­fits; pro­fes­sional com­pan­ion­ship and intel­lec­tual stim­u­la­tion are not included when self means self. No doubt, there are many things to keep your mind work­ing: new cus­tom­ers, new pro­jects, new lan­guages, new envir­on­ments, new products — how­ever your power to influ­ence any of these is very lim­ited. Work­ing with other smart people is just too darn attractive.

Know­ing that I wanted to return to a tech­nical, customer-facing, soft­ware related job filtered num­ber of qual­i­fy­ing jobs dimin­ish dra­mat­ic­ally. Stay­ing in Sydney, hav­ing a good man­ager, work­ing for a name-brand com­pany starts to fil­ter down the choice even more.

So when this Microsoft Enthu­si­ast Evan­gel­ist role appeared, I was over the moon and as keen as mus­tard. An excel­lent, well respec­ted man­ager. Check. Loads of cus­tom­ers, buck­ets of tech­no­logy and a strong desire to con­nect the two: Tick. Being a con­duit; tak­ing feed­back, show­ing and listen­ing in that order. Perfect.

Today, I signed on to Microsoft. Start on Thursday. Let the jour­ney begin. WooT!

FAQs

  1. What are you going to miss about the time off?

    2. Get­ting up at any­time in the morn­ing, read­ing lots of books, hav­ing the time to be able to research a com­pletely new IT sub­ject and watch­ing TV. Chilling out and doing very little has cer­tainly cleaned out the cobwebs.

  2. You are suck­ing up to your new boss, already, right?

    3. You read me like a book. No ser­i­ously, check him out. I did my ref­er­ence checks, too!

  3. Microsoft is big. Can you deal with the huge-ness?

    4. Yes, Microsoft is a huge organ­isa­tion with many people and lots of tools and tech­no­lo­gies. Their products touch vir­tu­ally every­one in the digital world, some­where. Being a small part of this big­ness is coolness.

  4. How much Garden­ing did you do?

    5. As prom­ised, none. I did how­ever water the garden under the dra­conian rules of Sydney Water dur­ing this period.

  5. So, you are never going to use a Mac nor Photoshop/InDesign again?

    6. I ser­i­ously doubt that. Microsoft cre­ates Mac soft­ware, and Photoshop/InDesign is ingrained into my sys­tem. The world is a much more com­plex place than “A vs. B”.

Topics: microsoft, personal, technology | 8 Comments »

8 Responses to “Let the New Journey Begin”

  1. frankarr - an aussie microsoft blogger : A passion for technology and also a desire to change the world ? Says:
    January 29th, 2007 at 9:18 pm

    […] A pas­sion for tech­no­logy and also a desire to change the world ? The 10 Mani­festo: One band of pas­sion­ate digital cit­izens reach­ing out to enthu­si­asts around the globe. Two-way com­mu­nic­a­tion that is based on mutual respect will lead to suc­cess. Three degrees make up the inter­view: The medium, the sub­ject, and the con­ver­sa­tion. Four corners of the world encom­pass mil­lions of ideas and a shared global ima­gin­a­tion. Five by five is how we com­mu­nic­ate; with max­imum strength and clar­ity. Six minutes of head­lines and links isn’t enough. We want to cre­ate opin­ions, depth, and focus. Seven days a week we hunt for dis­cus­sions on seven con­tin­ents. Work and life can be syn­thes­ized. Eight bits of media will grow into more than just bytes of data. They should inform and enthrall. Nine plus Ten is much more than nine­teen. Together we can teach, listen, and learn together. 10 is all of these things, but most import­ant it is what our users make it. Listen to every­one. Want to be part of this? We’re hir­ing We’ve hired! Tech­nor­ati tags: On10, Microsoft Aus­tralia Pub­lished Thursday, Decem­ber 07, 2006 11:18 PM by frank­arr Filed under: work, geek, announcement […]

  2. Frank Arrigo Says:
    January 29th, 2007 at 9:29 pm

    wel­come to the team dude!!!!

  3. Andrew Spaulding Says:
    January 30th, 2007 at 8:06 am

    Con­grats! Should be a great change of scenery, and a world of oppor­tun­it­ies. I look for­ward to read­ing about your experiences …

    Cheers,
    Spaulds

  4. Delicate Genius Says:
    January 30th, 2007 at 5:04 pm

    Wel­come to the fold dude!!!

    I’ve been on the job for 6 days and already I’m los­ing my “new­bie” tag — Woo Hoo!

    –dg

  5. hodgenick Says:
    January 30th, 2007 at 5:11 pm

    Looks like I am sweep­ing the floor and get­ting the cof­fees as the new­bie for the forsee­able future :-)

  6. OffBeatMammal Says:
    January 31st, 2007 at 8:09 am

    Wel­come to the fam­ily ;)
    I’m sure our paths will cross.
    BTW… check out Paint.NET (www.getpaint.net)… you’ll never use Pho­toshop again ;)

  7. Brian H. Madsen Says:
    February 3rd, 2007 at 5:47 pm

    Con­grat­u­la­tions Nick — from the deal­ings i’ve had with the Evan­gel­ist team they’re a good crowd and extremely fan­at­ical about tech­no­logy. real geeks basically!

    i hope you’ll enjoy your time with them — mind you, David is a bit weird but you’ll most likely learn to live with it. Kleefie is a biker..yes a geek biker..not many of those around.

    Any­ways, good luck with things at your new gig!

    but urrggghh…Mac and pho­toshop­ping??? ouch..that HAS to hurt!

  8. Falling Off the Face of the World | nickhodge.com | mungenet Says:
    April 26th, 2007 at 1:31 pm

    […] at Microsoft appeared. Know­ing Frank Arrigo through Mike Sey­fang, thanks to http://linkedin.com, I applied and the rest is now his­tory. It’s the first job that I saw that I really felt I wanted, and would be at >100% […]

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