www.nickhodge.com

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?

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?

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?

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?

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?

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”.