I've now been back at Sun for just over a year. When I returned, I think everybody in a position to be concerned was well aware that I would have rather been coming back to write software rather than being an HBA engineer. Regardless, I came back into the Storage organization in an attempt to help build the new HBA engineering team. Since that time, this group has moved from Storage to Systems. I will soon be completing my tour of the three "S"es. Effective October 1st, I will be transferring from this group to work in the Solaris organization, once again as a software engineer.
For several months, I looked forward to the time when this change might occur. I've missed writing software, although I have had a couple of small opportunities to do so in this group. I've written software for as long as I can remember, so it was hard to be in a position where software was something that was written by others. Despite all this, I find myself still on the fence a bit about this change. In fact, I probably put both my current managers and my new managers through a bit of uncertainty while I tried to reconcile in my head exactly what it was I wanted to do.
The great thing about this group is that I've enjoyed working with all of these folks. It's hard to leave a group like that, even if you know that the people you are going to be working with is also good. I certainly learned a lot over the past year, being exposed to many facets of the engineering universe that pure software engineers rarely get a chance to see. In retrospect, I think that experience has only served to make me a better engineer. When your job is simply to write software, it's easy to neglect all the other groups of people who may not be directly affected by your work. Having a broader perspective is without a doubt a huge advantage.
Despite the fact that I am still a bit unsure about what I'm leaving behind, I am certainly excited about the opportunity to get back to what I love. Based on my experience over the past year, I have no doubt that the HBA engineering team as well as the entire product team will continue to thrive.
