I’ve been at Oni/GE for almost ten years now. It has been a great time with a team of exceptional people working on some incredible technology. Now that GE has decided to end the product I’m back out in the job market and yesterday I had my first interview this time ’round.

I think the interview went well and it certainly has me thinking about the future in ways I hadn’t been in the recent past. It was a surprisingly jarring change when the facility closure was made official and I stopped thinking about future directions and possibilities for the scanner system. I’m used to having a mess of work related material sloshing around in my head and for the moment there’s none of that as we’re working on knowledge transfer and wrapping things up for the folks in Wisconsin who will be taking responsibility for ongoing maintenance issues (betting there will be none significant enough to warrant a release, but they have to be cautious about things).

Talking with the folks at KMC Systems did get me thinking about the limited horizons that the slow shrinkage of the Wilmington site has placed on us. I’m looking forward to working with a larger team and with a broader slate of issues than we’ve had/been able to tackle in the last few years. It has been a while since we’ve had a significant range of skill levels on the team and the broader challenges of moving on multiple objectives in parallel.

Talking with KMC has me revisiting many things that have been on the shelf for a while and I’m looking forward to working with a larger team again and a broader range of challenges (whether with them if they offer and I accept or somewhere else). I’ve enjoyed managing team interactions, bringing less experienced engineers along and juggling all of the issues involved with a new and developing product in the past. The focus over the last couple of years at Wilmington has narrowed down slowly but inexorably and I’ve been almost entirely working on bug fixes and feature implementation. Time for some new horizons (not that I have any choice, but I’m ready in any case) and new challenges…