Being a Federal Employee means being a part of something much bigger than many people, including myself, can really comprehend. The FAA employs about 50,000 people, with ~5,000 of them working here in Oklahoma. Susan supervises people in a dozen different states; her supervisor lives in a different state, too. My supervisor works in Oklahoma, and while I don’t manage other people (Thank God; I’m not all that great at managing myself!), I deal with networks and servers and people spanning across all fifty states and into five or six remote countries. Sometimes what I do feels pretty important, although truth by told you would probably need a magnifying glass to find me on any national-level organizational chart.

I’ve been working either with or for the FAA for almost sixteen years now. That many years of dealing with the government warps your sense of reality. I find more and more there are things I have become accustomed to that friends of mine who work in the private sector (or worse, the state) cannot relate to, and vice versa. I’ve never had a leave request of mine denied. I accrue more sick leave than I could hopefully ever use. I’ve attended more than my share of training classes and traveled to dozens of states doing all kinds of interesting work. Like any place of employment my job isn’t all roses, but the longer I’m there the harder it gets to complain about anything other than the normal day-to-day shizz that I’m sure goes on anywhere.

For a couple of weeks whispers of budget cuts had been circulating at work, although nobody knew what, which, or how bad funds would be cut. I’m not worried at all about losing my job (one of those things my friends in the private sector can’t relate to), but I am concerned about how I will perform my job in the future. Actually “concerned” may be too strong of a word, although “curious” doesn’t seem strong enough. That’s another reality I have unfortunately grown to accept: in my world, you do what you can do with what you have. And that’s it.

The rumors were true, and we’re just now beginning to see what’s getting cut. The first official memo we received informed us that, in 2011, we can expect the following: no new hires (this includes backfilling vacant positions), no raises (cost of living, promotion-related, or otherwise), no travel, no training, no conferences, and no new furniture. There are of course stipulations and exceptions to all of these things, but probably not at my level. Thank goodness I just got a new chair; I suspect I’ll be sitting in the same one for years to come.

There are rumors of other cuts to come as well. Rep. Mike Coffman has introduced a bill that would require federal employees to take a 10 day furlough in FY2010. Those two weeks would be unpaid, and employees could not use vacation during that time. As a dual income family with no debt to speak of (house and school loans only; all three cars are paid off) it’s a one-time storm we could weather, but it could cause legitimate hardships for many of our friends and co-workers. At least we’ve got a year’s notice. If that happens, Susan and I plan on trying to coordinate our two-weeks off and plan the road trip of a lifetime. We might even let the kids come.

For many years I worked as a government contractor, which, as I’ve always said, is a double-edged sword; the pay is great, but the job security aspect is always sketchy. In all my years as a contractor I was never out of work or laid off, but I saw lots of people who were, many with little or no notice. As a contractor, my salary was well above the national average when compared to other IT professionals. In 2010 when I returned to federal service from being a contractor I took roughly a 20% pay cut, trading job security for expendable income. My salary now falls right in the middle of the income bell curve; my paycheck is not the reason we as a country are in debt, I assure you.

Aspects of my job are about to change, and soon. Historically we have been a travel-heavy work force, and that will change at least in the short term. We also refresh our hardware more frequently than many other IT shops; that too could change. There are others rumors of restructures and consolidations, but right now they’re rumors and I can’t worry about them. All I can do is hold down my little part of the fort and hope the walls don’t crumble during my watch.

Sorry about the lack of updates. For an entire week, I’ve been trying to come up with the right words to explain just how happy I am. I started a new job this week … and by “new job”, I mean “the job I did for almost ten years.” It’s the job I left last September — and now, I’m back.

When I was younger I thought people only left jobs because they were unhappy, but over the past year I have learned that that’s not always the case. For essentially fifteen years I worked as a government contractor providing Infrastructure Support, and on a happiness scale I would have rated that job an 8 out of 10. A 9/10, I thought, would be a government job in some other department; a 10/10 would be a government job in the department I was currently working in.

I waited a long time (almost ten years) for a government position to open up in the department I was working in, but unfortunately one never came about. In September of 2009 a federal position opened up in a neighboring department’s IT Security branch, which I applied for and got. With a lump in my throat I packed up all my belongings, said goodbye to friends I had been working with since I was 20 years old, and made the long, lonely trek to the building next door.

Even though physically I wasn’t all that far from my old organization (the buildings are maybe a hundred yards apart), I felt like I had moved light years away. I had to re-learn everything, and I mean everything. The organization was new, the resources were new, the job function was new … it was just a completely new world to me. It would be akin to moving across the street into your neighbor’s house and then trying to find your way around with the lights turned off.

There were things about the new job I liked and things I didn’t like. I did a lot of security-related work and a lot of travelling and had a lot of fun and worked with a lot of really, really great guys. But there were things I didn’t like too, and the biggest one was that I wasn’t back working in the old organization that I knew inside and out. The longer I was away, the more I missed my old organization. Sometimes, during my afternoon breaks, I would stare out the window at my old building and wonder what my old friends were up to.

In April of this year, my old organization was finally able to open up some government positions. I applied for what essentially equated to my old job, but this time it would be as a federal employee. You might have guessed that when dealing with the government, things take time. It took three months before I was informed that I had been selected for the position. As I previously mentioned, I turned in my two-weeks notice in the beginning of July, which was extended for an additional two-weeks. I didn’t mind the extension one bit. I actually felt/feel bad about leaving the IT Security department — after all, they were the ones that gave me a break and got my foot in the door — but ultimately, I knew in my heart that this was the right move. This time, it doesn’t feel like I moved to another job. It felt like I was coming home.

(Oh, and I got a promotion in the process.)

I can tell you now that I am officially a 10/10 on the happiness scale. I hit the ground running Monday morning. Already this week I’ve written a couple of scripts on the fly, one to unlock hundreds of locked-out users and another to enable/configure DNS logging on our domain controllers. Wednesday I called one of our remote field offices and walked a computer specialist through troubleshooting an offline server. I have been plopped into an environment that I am completely comfortable in, one in which I understand the parameters and boundaries and know how to operate within. It feels really good.

I know this feeling won’t last forever. I know the newness will wear off. I know there will be bad days and there will be difficult times and there will be conflict, but right now I’m not thinking about any of those things. At the moment I am, quite possibly, the happiest I have ever been with my career. I am ready to take on the world (or “tear the ears off a Gundark,” as Luke Skywalker once said).

Or maybe it was Dorothy who said it best: “There’s no place like home.”

Blogging is a funny thing. Sometimes when I don’t post for a while it’s because nothing interesting is going on in my life. And sometimes when I don’t post for a while, it’s because things are so crazy that I haven’t had time to sit down and sort my thoughts out yet before I type them up. My recent stretch of silence is due to the latter.

The last time I quit a job was in September of 2009, when I left my old department (as a contractor) and moved to my current department, as a federal employee. My ideal career path would have been to stay in my old department and move into a federal position, but after waiting almost a decade for that to happen, I felt like I had to move on. In September of 2009, I accepted a federal position with a new department. It was very hard for me to leave my old job, as I had been working with some of the same people for almost fifteen years and I deeply enjoyed the work I was doing.

The new job has been a lot of fun as well. As a member of a security scanning team, my job is to perform security network scans, interpret the results and document them in reports. I work with a bunch of great guys, and over the past nine months I’ve had the opportunity to perform onsite security scans for government agencies in Durham, New York City, New Jersey, Colorado, Chicago, and Washington D.C.

I wasn’t really looking for another job, but one found me — my old one. Except this time, I’ll be going back as a federal employee. (I’m getting a promotion, too, which never hurts!) When this opportunity presented itself, I literally could not turn it down. I’ll be going back to my old room and working with my old friends once again. It will be working where I know, with people I know, doing what I know how to do. It’s totally my comfort zone, and it feels like I’m “going home”.

I turned in my two weeks notice on July 2nd, which would have made my last day at the current job Saturday, July 17th (the end of a pay period). My current boss has asked me to stay on one additional pay period, which I agreed to. My last day at the current job will be Saturday, July 31st. I start the new job Sunday, August 1st.

The next three weeks will be spent cross-training co-workers on what I do and what I know, which has actually been great fun so far. Last week I did a small class on web penetration testing which spilled over into SQL injections and a few other related topics. On Friday we did some wireless network scanning, and I’ll be working with the guys on documenting some of those processes before I leave as well.

In three weeks the new job will become the old job, and my old job will become my new job.

Today, I did something I haven’t done in over a decade: I turned in my two weeks notice at work.

I often tell people I’ve been working at the FAA since 1995, which is really a half-truth. It’s true I’ve been working at the FAA since 1995, but save for 18 months back in the late 90s, I haven’t been employed by them. Instead, I’ve been working as a contractor for a series of contracting companies, providing services for the FAA. Being a contractor isn’t embarrassing; it’s just easier to say “I work at the FAA” than to hash out all the details.

There are a lot of benefits to being a contractor: it’s relatively easy to get hired on (much easier than becoming a federal employee) and the pay is typically good. The downside is, there’s not much in the way of retirement and even less when it comes to job security. Personally I’ve always believed that if you do a good job and are pleasant to work with, you’ll always be able to find work somewhere as a contractor. Either that attitude has paid off or I’ve just been really lucky; regardless, I’ve had steady work out there for fourteen and a half years now and have never been laid off. I have several friends who were not so lucky, and met untimely fates.

Most contractors would eventually like to become federal employees. Unfortunately there just aren’t enough jobs to go around. Federal hiring rates are often affected by congress and the economy and there are a lot of hiring freezes. Whenever a federal position opens up, hundreds or sometimes thousands of people apply for it. Federal jobs are seen as the ultimate goal for many contractors. I landed a federal job with the FAA back in 1996 as a LAN Administrator position up in Spokane, Washington. Finally, I had reached my goal! My fellow contracting co-workers were congratulatory and jealous. I had made it! Susan and I, with help front friends and family, packed up all our possessions and moved to Washington state.

Eighteen months later, in 1998, I turned in my two weeks notice. We were young, and homesick, and perhaps foolish to give up those jobs. Susan and I returned to Oklahoma, tails between our legs, as contractors once again. Susan quickly found another government position, but I was not as lucky. I was told by several people that quitting the government was “the dumbest thing I could have ever done,” and sometimes I felt like they were right. I had a government job — the “holy grail” — and I let it go.

In the fall of 2000 I was promoted to Network Engineer, where I felt like I had found my calling. It wasn’t a government job, but I didn’t care. Instead of supporting end users, I was finally supporting the network itself. The area I worked in was CDA — Central Domain Administration — and the five of us who worked there were the Domain Admins. Over the next few weeks, months and years I learned the ins and outs of a Windows-based network. I started off by earning several Windows Certifications (Workstation, Server, Enterprise, TCP/IP, etc) and applying that knowledge to our environment. I had many people take me under their collective wings and teach me things. We all found what we were good at; my background of writing batch files came in handy and I wrote (and to this day, write) lots of batch files, VB scripts and VB apps to help automate network tasks.

Over the next few years I saw several of my friends leave and take federal positions. I was — we were — always a little jealous to see friends leave, but I was always happy where I was. The people around me changed (some came, some went, some returned), but I was always happy. And now, the co-workers I have now are literally the best group of people I’ve ever worked with. I really mean that.

I’ve seen a lot of federal positions advertised since I returned to the life of a contractor, but to be honest, none of them interested me. That is, until a month or two ago. For the first time, some federal positions were posted that looked tempting. The first round of positions were for network admins, basically doing what I do now. I applied for those, but never heard back. “Wasn’t meant to be,” I said. Then, last month, another job was advertised, one that seemed to be written specifically for me. The FAA was looking for a security specialist to perform network security and vulnerability scans. That’s right up my alley! I filled out the application and promptly forgot all about it.

That is, until last week, when I was contacted out of the blue and offered the position. To be honest I was flabbergasted. I must admit the stress was immense, being forced to choose between a federal position and a contract position that I am both comfortable with and that I enjoy. At the age of 36, something else came into play — not just the job security of a federal position, but the retirement. Currently, I have essentially no retirement. That’s something I didn’t worry about fifteen, ten or even five years ago, but the older I get, the more these things weigh on me.

Ultimately, I chose the new position, a decision that at least for me, defines bittersweet. The new job sounds like a dream to me and I am very excited about the opportunities and challenges that await me — in the same breath, it would be easier to justify leaving my current position if I could find something wrong with it. I work with some of my best friends. I’ve been working for the same line of business for almost fifteen years and doing the same job for nine and a half of those years. I’m very comfortable, both in my knowledge level and my salary. Quitting this job is just about the hardest work-related thing I’ve ever had to do; the only thing that would be harder right now, I think, is letting this new opportunity pass me by.

My official offer letter came swiftly, via e-mail last last week. I accepted, and started the ball rolling today with my two-weeks notice. My last day in my current position is Friday, September 25th. I start the new job Monday, September 28th.

Wish me luck.