Starting 2019 with a new job

Monday, Jan 14, 2019 4 minute read Tags: career readify microsoft
Hey, thanks for the interest in this post, but just letting you know that it is over 3 years old, so the content in here may not be accurate.

In my 2018 year in review I mentioned that I wrapped up 2018 by wrapping up at Readify and in January this year I started at Microsoft as a Cloud Developer Advocate.

I’ve blogged about the journey I took at Readify as I moved through the consulting team and into the sales team. But after 8 years, 3 months and 2 days I left Readify for the last time (as an employee).

Why now?

I’ve been asked this a few times by people since I started telling them I was leaving and naturally I point them to this YouTube clip to sum it up:

Just kidding!

It actually comes down to two main reasons, a great opportunity and a lot of the same reasons I joined Readify initially.

Leaving Readify

This was a really tough decision, Readify had been my home for so long now, over double my next longest employer, so the idea of not being part of the Readify family was quite daunting.

But I knew that my time in the Pre-Sales role was coming to an end. I was on a 12 month secondment, so it was never a permanent thing, but that meant that I would have to work out what else I wanted to do.

This lead me to a cross-roads, I wanted to do one of two things, either take on a bigger challenge of technical strategy (leading the strategy for a business, department head, CTO, etc.) or go back to my roots and get technical.

Through the acquisition in Telstra the opportunity to tackle the former was very much there and I was looking at some options there, but at the same time I was talking to Microsoft about the CDA role. Over the course of a few months my wife and I had many discussions on this and I changed my mind maybe a hundred times on what I wanted to do next. In the end it came down to a single decision.

Not letting an opportunity pass me by

A few years ago I was approached by a friend in a product group at Microsoft to apply for a role. It was on a product I am passionate about so it would have been a very good fit. But it was bad timing, my wife and I had recently had a personal tragedy that made us shift some of our priorities and meant we weren’t in a position to relocate to the US, which the role required.

As the years have gone by, while I don’t regret the decision, I have often wondered “what if…”. And that was a key driver this time around, I didn’t want to look back in a few more years and think “what if…”.

In the end this played a large factor on my decision to move on from Readify. I really enjoyed my time at Readify, it’s a great place to work, I learned so much during my time there and would recommend it highly as a place to work for someone who’s wanting to work in consulting or wants to work with some amazing people. I’m sad I won’t get to watch the evolution of Readify from the inside, the next few years do look pretty exciting, but I don’t want to look at this opportunity in Microsoft and say “what if…”.

So what’s next?

I’m part of the Cloud Advocate team at Microsoft, I’ve joined as a Regional Cloud Developer Advocate, focusing on the Australian (and in particular Sydney) IT communities. What does mean in practice? Well I’m still figuring that out, I’m only 1 week in so it’ll take a bit of time 😝. But you’ll likely see a lot more of my online and around the communities here, so if you’re an event organiser I’d love to talk to you!