Replies

That day was spent calling my appointments, letting them know that I wouldn't be there, and filling in the other field engineers on what I was working on.

That was a "nice" thing to do for an employer booting you out the door. You could have given your customers your cell phone number and offered to contract them at a more favorable rate than your soon to be ex-employer. It's not like you were in danger of losing a big severance.

I didn't want to screw over my clients, and I knew that my manager didn't want to let me go. It came from corporate HQ. I was a Novell specialist, and the level of Novell service calls had been steadily going down. They did ask me to help their Novell clients "off the record," if I could, and it did help somewhat while I was unemployed. But now that I've got a full time + job, I can't help them anymore, and they've had to find new sources of support.

Actually, one reason that they let me go was because "I wasn't a Windows expert." Funny, the 3 clients who had problems that they used for that reason never were able to get the problems solved by my old company, even when they called in "Windows experts" from out of town. And now I work in a Windows shop, and my boss thinks that I'm pretty darn good at fixing serious Windows problems. I'm sort of happy they lost business because of letting me go, but then again, it was a business decision, and the company was crap to work for.

My new company is SO much better.

Mark

Sometimes getting layed off is a blessing. I have a friend in San Diego who was layed off just when his wife discovered she was expecting. He thought the timing was terrible. It turns out that he was layed off just in time to prevent his gross income from disqualifying him from getting help from some public assistance programs. He found a decent job within 90 days and got back on his feet.

You have to possess competency in multiple disciplines to avoid getting dumped for limited capability. I've been in the business for almost 30 years. It doesn't matter whether the problem is DOS, Windows, QNX, UNIX (Linux, HP-UX, Solaris, AIX) or some embedded, real time OS. I write applications in assembler for Intel and Motorola processors, C, C++, C#, Java, python, JavaScript, HTML, XML, XSL/XLST. Data communications in X.25, LU6.2, TCP/IP. I've had the pleasure of programming Qualcomm chipsets to manipulate the CDMA provisioning process. Current work includes creating CAN controllers on PIC18F6585 using a Vector CAN-tech CANopen stack and pairing that with a CANopen stack that runs in Linux based on tool for port, GmbH.

Keep your skills fresh. Add new ones that look like they will be in demand soon. Be ready to offer your services in a new technology. I have a Microchip ZigBEE demo kit coming in tomorrow. I'll be using that to integrate a container tracking tag with my railcar sensors. ZigBEE is a bleeding edge wireless sensor data acquisition system based on 802.5.14. The vendor creating the tag is expanding the horizons of the technology. Search for 802.5.14 on Google to get a sense of just how "on the edge" ZigBEE is.