On Monday, I put in my notice at my current job in preparation of starting a new adventure next month. It was a decision I made with much regret as I loved the work, the team, and the company. What I didn’t like was being awakened by my pager on countless nights as some production system or another at work melted down. That, and the several weekends of marathon maintenance work, some keeping me awake all night. I have been hit hard enough lately with the Gulf War Illness fatigue that I couldn’t pile on weeks of guaranteed disrupted sleep. It was affecting my health, it was disturbing my wife’s sleep, too, and taking family time away from me on those work-filled weekends. Unfortunately, no other relief was in sight other than to change jobs.
It wasn’t log into my job search that I realized just how in-demand my skills were. My resume on CareerBuilder attracted 2-3 job opportunities each day. Unfortunately, many of those were generated by lazy recruiters doing keyword searches and consisted of far-flung jobs that often didn’t match my skills or interests. On the bright side, several actual, clueful recruiters did reach out to me with decent opportunities. One of them wrote that this was the hottest IT job market his firm has seen in years, and I believe it. Actual quote:
We are in the strongest market for IT careers that we’ve ever seen and will be sending out lots of emails today.