Employed

So, I'm employed! After almost two months of unemployment with no job offers I received two offers last week. One was for a small company in downtown DC as the sole systems administrator; the other was for a huge company that does work for the government among other things, including manufacturing.

And while the whole time I was saying that, all else being equal, I would prefer to work for a small company, all else wasn't equal and I took the big company's offer. I'm now an employee of ITT's Advanced Engineering & Sciences division working on a long-term contract at the Naval Research Laboratory.

I'm working as a Linux Systems Administrator with a huge amount of technology that I've never worked with before (some, I've never even heard of). The sheer scale of things is pretty amazing/terrifying. Previously, the largest storage system I've built (or even had contact with) is right around one terabyte; I asked about how much storage we are dealing with at NRL and various systems are into the tens and even hundreds of terabytes. Everything's clustered and redundant and big. It's pretty cool.

I wrote several more paragraphs going through the factors influencing my selection, but when I hit save it kicked me out and didn't save. I'm not going to rewrite the whole thing, so he's a quick list:

• Money: both were the same
• Dress code: casual, jeans & t-shirts ok (this is big to me)
• Commute: small company wins. Downtown DC vs. across the Wilson Bridge (notorious traffic hot spot for you non-DC types). This was a big hesitation. I can slug straight into DC, but I pretty much have to drive to NRL. I tried slugging one day this week, but it was pretty ugly.
• Government bureaucracy: there will definitely be more of this at NRL, but it doesn't seem too bad.
• The work: most of what I'd be doing at the small company is similar to what I've done before. I feel quite out of my depth at NRL, so it'll be way more challenging.
• Co-workers: I've never worked with other Linux admins, and I'm quite looking forward to it.
• Security Clearance: I'll get one at NRL. This is big, too. About half of the job listings I looked at required a security clearance. Without it, I couldn't even apply. Security clearance equals more job options in the future.
• Benefits: the big company's benefits are big.

Looking at this list, I don't think it does justice to my thinking on the matter. Once I had both offers in hand, there was really no contest. What I had written before was clearer on this point.

I started Tuesday.