It seems like every other post on this site has been about me getting a new job. But it’s only my third in six years which just goes to show I really need to post on here more.
Anyway, I’ve got myself another new job. There are various reasons for me doing this. Chief among them, for me at least, are a desire to move the hell away from this hellhole of a city that they call London. I don’t like it here. Can you tell?
My new job is with a company called Advanced. They’re a huge company, apparently the third largest software provider in the UK. I’m going to be working for their Managed Services division, mostly looking after cloud stuff I think. The job title is Senior Systems Engineer (Cloud Division). The job is going to be a fully remote position which I’m pleased about as I’ve grown to quite like primarily working from home and it will allow us to move away from London. Did I mention how much I dislike it here?
It was an unusual recruitment process: I got a call from a recruiter from an agency call VIQU who found my CV on one of the recruitment sites (Monster, Reed, Totaljobs etc). She gave me an aptitude test and a problem solving test. I then had to re-take the problem solving test while on a Teams call with her to make sure I wasn’t cheating. A couple of days after I passed that, I held an interview with Advanced themselves. When I got through to them, they didn’t know the first thing about me, apart from my name and I had to sell myself and my skillset to them. I thought it went quite well, and they asked me to come back for a second interview to give a presentation about migrating from ConfigMgr to Intune. That again went well; they offered me the job and I accepted. So as of the 31st August 2021 I’m working for the private sector for the first time in near enough two decades.
I’ll be working for the Managed Services arm of the company, so I’ll be doing work for customers rather than for the company directly. One of the customers is going to be a government department which made me chuckle a little; after nearly 20 years of working for the public sector, I’m working for a private company on behalf of the public sector.
Anyway, I handed my resignation into the Haberdashers at the beginning of last June and to be honest, the overriding feeling I got was one of relief. This isn’t like when I moved from LSFC to Westminster when, in retrospect, I clearly left when I didn’t want to and when I wasn’t ready. When I moved to Westminster, I actually extended my notice period with LSFC because, ostensibly, I wanted to finish the academic year and complete the projects I had going on although looking back I did it because I didn’t really want to go. This time, I wanted to move to a new job, I was ready to move and frankly if I could have reduced my notice period I would have done. I think that is the surest sign that I’m doing the right thing with moving on. The only thing I regret is not grabbing some of the better scripts that I wrote to post on here. I was quite pleased with some of them, especially the PRTG scripts that monitored SQL databases and VMs in Azure. God damn it.
Anyway, onwards and upwards! I think this is going to be a good job and I’m looking forward to getting stuck in.
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