return undefined;

Today marks the beginning of my final week as a Fidelity Investments employee. I have accepted an offer to join Universal Mind, where I will get to focus on using Adobe Flex to build great software for their impressive client list. I am super excited and extremely honored that I will get to work alongside Darron Schall, Doug McCune, Adam Flater and a host of other wickedly smart people. I didn’t even realize Darron worked for UM so imagine my surprise when I saw his name on the invite list for my Technical Interview. The dude has written a freakin’ Commodore 64 emulator and a VNC client in AS3. I mean come on. He thankfully didn’t ask me any questions about emulators though and I must have done alright since I officially start on February 19th. I can’t wait to get started and begin contributing to the amazing team Universal Mind has assembled.

Note: The rest of this post is a fairly detailed explanation on my reasoning behind this move. I began writing it simply for posterity and my own benefit but after reading Ryan and Chuck’s posts I suppose it can serve as another perspective/response to their discussions as well. If you could give a rat’s bleep about my thought process (99.9999% of you by my estimation), you can stop reading now.

Leaving Fidelity was not an easy decision. In addition to the fact that I have made some very good friends and enjoyed the two years I spent there, its a very stable company with amazing benefits and they treat their employees extremely well. The company has also historically been very forward thinking when it comes to technology and continues to devote considerable attention and resources to IT, including a pretty significant adoption of Flex in several areas of the company. They were one of the first, if not the first, financial firms to use things like account management via automated telephone systems, the Web and data centers. Their web site(s) is/are still very good and are consistently rated the best in their industry. If you’re like me and prefer to do just about everything online, (people still writes checks and mail them in envelopes?) I would highly recommend using Fidelity. The rare times you do have to call them you receive top notch customer service from knowledgeable reps. I can also say they are genuinely focused on making their customers successful and prosperous. So why am I leaving a company I obviously hold in such high regard? The department I work in has recently gone through a restructuring to more closely align with overall company goals, and as a result our Flex work has dried up. There is a lot of Flex work going on in other parts of the company, but that doesn’t help me much. If I had stayed I would be doing primarily ASP.NET work for at least the next year, which is not something I am interested in doing full-time.

I decided to use that upheaval as a reason to look into the consulting world everyone has been raving about. As a husband and father I can only consider jobs that provide full benefits, and as a result have been watching the Flex consulting circus from afar for some time now with a mixture of jealousy and curiosity. Before the changes in my department, however, I couldn’t justify leaving the position I was already in. I was working on cool projects that people actually use to do their jobs, was the go to guy for Flash and Flex in my department and I live less than 3 miles from work. I had also casually discussed jobs with a couple of consulting firms in the past, but for various reasons didn’t feel like they were a good fit for me. Having heard good things about UM and seeing they had hired some real all-stars I decided to look into them a bit further. After sending my resume in I had an initial interview and then a second. The second was the Technical Interview I mentioned above and I have to say it was a blast. It was Thomas Burleson, Darron and Doug drilling me with questions for 90 minutes. Very cool, especially since I knew most of the answers. :) Throughout the entire process with UM, the people I dealt with were smart, passionate about their jobs and simply seemed like good people. What more can you really ask for?

I guess what it essentially comes down to is that I want to spend my working hours building killer Flex apps. When I finally started playing with Flex almost two years ago (Flex 2 Beta 2) it renewed a passion for learning and improving my skills that I hadn’t experienced since first discovering Flash and programming in college. When you find something you enjoy this much, you want to do it as much as possible, alongside the best possible people, on the biggest possible stage. For me right now that is UM. My position at Fidelity is definitely what Chuck refers to as a “career job” in that I could work there for another 30 years and retire somewhat early and be very comfortable financially. In the end though I felt like I am young enough and its early enough in my career that I want to take on a new challenge. Out of college I worked in a very small design agency (I was employee #5 when I started) and then moved on to Fidelity where last I heard there are about 46,000 employees. I feel like consulting via UM will allow me to experience a lot of the shades of gray between those two extremes while retaining the relative security of full-time employee status. It also gives me an opportunity to work alongside people I can learn (a lot) from. Don’t get me wrong, I worked with a lot of smart people at Fidelity who could teach me volumes on a variety of topics, but when I hit a brick wall with a Flex problem there weren’t a lot of internal resources to turn to. Not so at Universal Mind. Their existing team reads like a virtual who’s who of the Flex community. Now my problem won’t be getting an answer, it will be trying to not look like an idiot in the process. :)

So to everyone at Fidelity, best of luck and thank you for the past two years. I thoroughly enjoyed and genuinely appreciate everything I experienced there. Hopefully our paths will cross again at some point down the road.

To everyone at UM I can’t wait to get settled, meet those of you I haven’t, and start building first class Flex applications with you. The industry is on fire, lets get our gas cans.