Well, in case you didn’t know, today marks the last day of my first (and possibly shortest) consulting assignment after only a short six weeks. I’ll have to say it didn’t come to any surprise last week when my manager told me I was being let go… I had been begging and searching for work to do the entire time and the project that the team was slated to work on got the ax before it exited “design phase.”
It was an interesting experience, and definitely a perfect picture of a 21st century large scale business struggling to figure out how to fix it’s broken processes. Although I am somewhat happy to be moving away from the position since I was left with nothing to do, I’m also sad that I didn’t get to help coach some of the changes I was hoping to do… to help find solutions to some of the problems I saw developers, project managers, and middle management face on a daily basis. Maybe one day I’ll return, like William Adama to New Caprica. 
So where next? I have an in person interview for another company tomorrow, and judging from the phone interview I had and what I heard from others it’s a lot less “Office Space-esque” so it’ll be interesting to see how it goes. A lot of people have been telling me not to feel bad about the experience here, that not every consulting assignment goes like this, etc… but for me I was actually quite expecting the experience I had… remember, I didn’t leave Carfax for greener pastures offered by the client site I was going to be assigned at, but rather the challenge of being thrust back into a waterfall process that has a culture that keeps developers isolated from each other and trying to overcome those challenges to help the team developer better software and find real solutions that work.
Maybe next time.
Wow, you brought Adama into it?