Karan asked if I was sure that I wanted to leave QA. I think I can say yes though not without some disappointment.

I was always proud to be a part of tech; in the first two years I thrived on the challenge and the newness of it all. Infowave was a magical place to work; the technology was so cool and the people even cooler. Even with the insane hours, we loved what we did and loved being together. Ask anyone who worked there and they all say the same thing. Stockhouse was a very similar situation.

The later years brought the layoffs which is part of the game. It sucks to be looking for work. It sucks to go through several rounds of interviews, write all the tests, make it to the final round and then not even be worthy of being contacted to say they went with the other guy. That happened to me several times.

Then there are the jobs that just suck. ResponseTek falls into that category; while the people were mostly great, I dreaded going into that place everyday. Towards the end I had sort of accepted my fate to toil away testing a shitty Flash application. (The idea is a good one but Flash was a poor choice…).

That’s no way to live your life so when Spanky gave me the chance to return to Infowave, I thought about it for three seconds and said yes. If I hadn’t returned to Infowave, I’d already be doing something else; ResponseTek would have killed me. They still think it’s 1999…

I didn’t intend for this to be an overview of the four years I spent in IT. I know that I’m tired of it all and that I don’t believe the hype anymore. I’m jaded and have lost the desire to be a part of it. I’ve had a love/hate relationship with QA over the years. I wanted to do web development or be a systems admin. QA at Infowave was cool, at Stockhouse it was easy, at ResponseTek it sucked.

So why not return to school and be that web developer or systems admin? I thought about that. What would it get me apart from more debt? A few more years of long hours and worrying about the quarterly results. Now days it’s expected that QA guys have professional programming experience but I don’t get that. What the hell do you want? A tester or a cheap programmer; I can sorta read code but I’ve never written it at work.

I ‘know’ C/C++, VB and Assembler. “The position requires .NET, C#, ASP and SQL” The next position requires SOAP, XML, PHP and MySQL. You can’t win and I’ve seen lotsa positions in the $35k range that require two years of programming experience. No thanks. I’m done and it doesn’t hurt too bad. I just want to get on with my life.

Mostly I’m disappointed at the way things have turned out but I have zero regrets (well, I wish I had made some larger payments on my student loan…) I guess I could have another run at tech but I just don’t have the desire to do what needs to be done.

I was a part of it. I’ve lived large at a dot com and worked with cutting edge technology. It was a fantastic time and I’m pround of what I’ve done and the friends that I’ve made. I don’t think I was an amazing tester but competent might be a good description.

I know there’s something else out there for me but I don’t know what it is. Rachel lent me a book called What Should I Do With My Life? I’m about a third of the way through it and it’s been very good. The author interviewed various people and tells the storey of how they ended up doing what they do.

It seems that very few people *know* for sure what they are destined to do. Some think they do and then realize they were wrong. The thing is, they kept looking. I’ve done a few things in my life and it’s time to do something else.

I know that I probably will never be rich; that’s ok, money doesn’t solve all your problems. Chances are that I won’t sort out cold fusion or bring peace to the Middle East and that’s ok too. The main thing is that I’m finally at peace with leaving. That was never the case before which was why I kept plugging away. Now I can let it go.

I have no idea what the future will bring but I’ll keep looking.