I need a vacation.

Wow, this has been some week. Let's see, where to begin? Well, as I mentioned earlier Geoff and I spent a few days mountain bking in the hills of Belmont. I neglected to mention a slight mishap that occurred, as it seemed trivial at the time. My bike has clipless pedals (for the non-cyclist, these are the really tiny pedals that clamp onto special metal cleats on your shoes - mine are slightly larger than most as they have plastic surrounds so you can use 'em with regular shoes as well). I am not particularly good at getting into and out of clipless pedals, as anyone who's ridden with me (or watched me at a stoplight) will agree. While riding down a particularly steep grade, I decided to unclip my feet so that if I were to have to stop suddenly I would be able to put my feet down more quickly. However, when the sudden stop came it came with enough force to slide my feet forward on the pedals, thereby re-clipping me in! Needless to say, hilarity ensued as I toppled sideways, newly reattached to my faithful steed. This is not the funny bit.

The funny bit is that I managed to land in a patch of poison oak. After a few days' incubation, My right side proceded to swell, blister and itch with astonishing speed and intensity. I've never had this stuff before - I think I'd rather have landed in a wasps' nest. As such, I've spent the last week itchy and crabby. Mel's been a saint to put up with me. The good news is, everyplace I'm broken out is hidden by a regulation tuxedo, so Ryan and Sara's wedding won't be marred by my unlucky timing.

As most of you know, last week was my first week at Cisco Systems, the networking giant headquartered in San Jose. Their offices occupy a space roughly the size of Rhode Island - in San Jose alone they have buildings 1-25 and buildings A-R, none of which are particularly small. At over forty thousand employees, Cisco is several orders of magnitude larger than any company I've ever worked for. Heck, the group I joined was larger than any company I'd worked for but ViaSat.

What most of you probably don't know is that last week was also my last week at Cisco. I quit Friday, setting a new record for shortest time at a job. The previous record was two weeks, held by Information Management Associates. They wrote telemarketing software. You know that annoy call you get where you say 'hello?' and then there's a two second pause before someone actually comes on the line? Yeah, that was them. They appear to have gone out of business - good riddance. So, why the rapid turnaround? Well, a combination of factors, the primary of which requires a little back story.

Back in March, when I was first contacted by Cisco, I was told about an exciting new project called AON (short for Application-Oriented Networking). It invovled pushing many of the same technologies and functionality that I'd been working on at Reactivity down into the network itself. I've seen this as a somewhat inevitable move for a while now (I'm still not convinced it's a good idea), but if done right it holds a lot of promise for simplifying applications and systems using web services-style messaging. Cisco is exactly the sort of company to be successful at this sort of move - they own a good chunk of the enterprise networking market and have a sales force primed to move this type of technology.

At the time, I hadn't discussed going back to Reactivity with Brian (my former manager) but I knew there was a strong likelyhood that I would be able to return if I wanted. However, I'd already been replaced by a very competent security engineer, so it wasn't clear what role I'd be in. I knew I really liked the people there, but I was just wrapping up a graduate degree and was full of big ideas about making a splash. In short, Cisco seemed like the place with more room to grow. I knew, however, that I didn't want to harm Reactivity; I deeply respect everyone there and bore them no ill will.

The AON project was shrouded in secrecy - getting any kind of detail was like pulling teeth. I knew I'd be working on security - maybe. As the technololgy overlap was significant, one of my first questions was 'Are you competitive with Reactivity?' I was assured by everyone I spoke with that AON was not competitive; It was a radical rethink of the boundary between application and network, and companies like Datapower and Reactivity were the furthest thing from the AON group's collective minds. In retrospect, I think I was a bit naive in accepting this; in my defense, I couldn't get enough information to judge one way or the other, so I gave them the benefit of the doubt.

Meanwhile, I talked about potential future directions with Brian as well. Brian's suggestion was that I could look at the scalability and distributed systems aspects of the Reactivity product line, finding ways of building bigger systems and solving bigger problems. However, the security focus would be limited; there just wasn't enough demand from customers to require two people working full-time on security. So, great people and somewhat interesting work, or unknown people (and working for GiantCo for the first time ever) doing security? In the end, I chose to keep a little continuity in my career and told Cisco yes (though Brian is a remarkably persuasive guy, and Cisco's hired HR guns screwed enough things up ot make me reconsider my decision).

Fast forward to May. I pay a visit to the office in hopes of getting more information before my start date - before I signed on, there was talk of getting me started part time in Ithaca, but that never happened. My first visit is useless - my manager had an emergency car problem and couldn't make it in that day. My manager's boss led me around the office introducing me as 'joining from Reactivity - one person even went so far as to say 'We're really killing them now!'. Warning bells start going off. The second day is almost as pointless - I finally meet my manager, who spend half an hour talking about the project in very broad strokes before sending me on my way. My requests for specs, code or other documentation are rebuffed - I don't think they trusted me. However, I grit my teeth and promise myself I won't turn tail yet.

Which brings us to last week. I'll leave out the litany of petty GiantCo horrors - suffice to say I spent my first day sitting alone in a cube poking around the corporate intranet on a borrowed laptop. Mel took me out to lunch. The interesting bits started on Wednesday, when someone in upper management sent out an email to the team congratulating them - upper management had approved the concept for the next-generation hardware specs. In the email was a link to the presentation given at the sign-off meeting. Curious, I started flipping through the slide deck. About halfway through I found the 'Competetive strategy' slide, and guess who's listed? DataPower, Reactivity, Forum and others in the space. I started looking through other documents on the same web site, and it became obvious that AON was directly competitive with Reactivity - and always had been.

At that point, my course was clear. I'd repeatedly told myself that if the project competed with Reactivity, I'd quit; now I just had to find another job pronto! Luckily, Brian's not one to hold a grudge, and I'll be back at my old company on Monday. I'm still not sure what I'll be doing, but I guarantee I'll sleep better at night doing it.

To add one final surreal twist to the story, I'm not sure my Cisco manager knows I've quit yet. He cancelled his one-on-one meeting with me on Friday at 11; At 1 pm I was to attend a meeting with him and several members of the engineering staff. I really didn't want to learn anything more about the technical details of the product at this point, so I left my loaner laptop and badge on his desk with a note explaining my reasons for leaving. In retrospect, I should've followed up with an email. At 3 PM I get a call on my cell from him; I let it ring through to voicemail (cowardly, I know). His message? "Your real laptop arrived; drop by my cube to pick it up." WTF?