A little over a year ago I embarked on an adventure with Microsoft Consulting Services that would have me travel over 160,000 miles throughout the United States.
During this time I met great customers, made great friends, and had many lunches, dinners and drinks with members of the larger SQLFamily.
The one family I kept missing was my own – travel made me miss them too much to enjoy my work as a consultant as much as I once did. I knew going in that I’d have to travel a lot, but never expected the travel would take such a toll on me – and my family.
I loved being a consultant. I loved working directly with customers and helping them work through their challenges. I loved learning new things as I helped them. I loved teaching them new things as I helped them. I loved coming up with creative solutions that solved a myriad of problems and saved hundreds of thousands of dollars. But I humanly couldn’t handle the travel anymore.
Once decided that I needed to make a change before I went nuts, I came up with five requirements for my next adventure:
1) It would have to be super fun. The environment would have to be dynamic and filled with enthusiastic folks.
2) It would have to be flexible enough to allow me to continue with my SQL Server community involvement. Helping and teaching others keeps me sane.
3) It would have to pose great engineering challenges. My ADHD kicks into high gear otherwise.
4) Minimum to no travel requirements.
5) Manageable commute to work, with occasional work from home schedule.
And so I am happy to tell you all that I found such an adventure.
Starting April, I will be part of the Database Engineering team at SurveyMonkey.
SurveyMonkey is headquartered in Palo Alto, CA – but the database team is actually spread across HQ, the Portland, OR office, and now the Seattle, WA office with me working there.
If you can’t understand why I’m so happy to be a part of this company, I’ll give you an idea by linking you to the employee perks page. And although absolutely fantastic, those are just the perks – what I really like about this company is the people who work for it – and I’m glad I’m joining them.
I’m looking forward to what’s next.
Cheers,
-Argenis