* Insert Quaking Knees Here *

So, I looked a perfectly good career in the eye and shot it in the face.  What next, you might ask.  You do have a plan, don't you?  It takes a job to get a job, don'tcha know.

Of course, I know all of these things.  The real problem in my mind is that the world has gotten so much more complex, so much more interesting in the twenty-five years I've been employed and reproducing in my petri dish that I don't really know what is going on outside of that dish.  There are new methods of doing things, new programming languages battling it out.  Frankly, if there hadn't been publicly accessible big datasets, I probably wouldn't have left my job.  The work I was doing was The Bomb.  We were learning all sorts of new things about what congestion is, what application crashes look like, how to find latency in networks.  And the datasets... ahhhh the datasets were beautiful.  We were pulling configuration data and parsing that out to understand what a true denominator was for the traffic numerator.  We were linking across vendors and platforms.  I had the coolest. job. ever.  Really.

'cept I'd been doing it for umpteen bejillion years.  And, turns out, it's made me a data snob.  Like really... I hear "80 terabytes of data" and I yawn.  I hear, "a million records a week / a day", I pooh-pooh.  They talk about 75 categorical features and I snort.  Don't get me started on the 108 fields of interest.  I made Excel workbooks with more columns than that.  So there's a lot of data being called "Big" out there which is more "dainty" than anything.  And this is a wonderful thing to recognize because it was hard to walk away.  I worked with some of the smartest, funniest, most driven people on the planet implementing a new world of communications and it was cool.

By staying in the field, I got to stay close to that bleeding edge and learn continuously for twenty-five years.  How I survived the minefields of layoffs, buy-outs, re-orgs, and severed divisions always seemed to come down to someone wanted me to move onto some other job with only a horrible commute (not an immensely horrible, or I would have gotten a package) which didn't qualify for a package.  I had three bosses over this twenty-five year period who recognized and rewarded the work I produced, and encouraged my bad behavior.  To those three men, I say (and have said), thank-you because I hit what felt like the pinnacle of success to me.  And being at that pinnacle, looking around at the view of my own personal vista was great for a few years, but the question of "What Next" began to haunt me like a yodeled echo.

I mean, what more could an engineer want after she's acquired a Hello Kitty computer bag, a Lenin mustache & goatee, and a Battlefield t-shirt?