Job 4: Syndesis
After 3 1/2 years at Webmedx, I decided to start interviewing for other opportunities. While I generally liked Webmedx, we had moved to a different part of Pittsburgh, and the commute had become very difficult — especially in snowy weather, which was frequent for much of the year. I also had questions about compensation. Webmedx had given me a promotion to Senior Engineer and included a generous salary bump relative to what I had been making when I started, but it still seemed low. Looking for other jobs seemed like the most reliable and data-driven way for me to know for sure that I was paid fairly relative to the market.
I ended up interviewing for, and receiving an offer for, a job with a company named Syndesis, located in Wexford, PA. This cut my commute down to 1/3 of what it was to Webmedx and increased my salary more than 30% — a huge increase. Syndesis was actually the Canadian parent company that had acquired the Pittsburgh office a year or two previously. Syndesis made software for the major telecommunications providers, and CoManage had created a product, TrueSource, that would help telecommunications providers detect and resolve discrepancies in their hardware configuration. At its core, TrueSource was a giant tree-comparison algorithm where the trees represented an entire telecommunications network, from servers down to network interface cards and individual parts. One tree would represent the network as intended by the network designers, and the other tree would be built via SNMP and other protocols and would represent the network as it actually existed. Any difference between the two networks would generate an action item that would be tracked and triaged until it was resolved.
2–3 months after I started working at Syndesis, Syndesis announced they would be acquired by an even larger telecommunications software conglomerate, Subex Azure, headquartered in India.
“Nothing will change in the Pittsburgh office,” they said. “Business as usual.”
Shortly after the acquisition closed, I realized that some interviews I had on my calendar had gotten canceled. Turns out that, by “nothing will change”, they meant “hiring freeze”. As the last-hired engineer for the Pittsburgh-based office of a Canadian company now acquired by an Indian conglomerate, I polished my resume (it was still pretty fresh), making Syndesis one of two six-month jobs on my resume.
1: Lessons I'm learning
The TrueSource product was not a web-based software application. It was a Client/Server application written in Java using the Swing library. Software updates were not automatic and were bundled together into major releases each year; clients, IIRC, had to renew their contract to get new features. The software development process at the company followed a waterfall model. Each one-year release was delivered in phases. Requirements specification, followed by design, development, testing and release. There was some overlap across the phases, but due to the timing of my six months with the company, I basically saw the testing and release phases of one major release and was just starting to take part in the design phase of the next release. I did very little software development in the six months I was there. It's easy to take for granted the fast iteration cycles that have become commonplace with agile software development, web-based software delivery, and continuous integration and deployment; not having those was a very different way to build software.
Syndesis was also the only place I've worked where everybody at the company had their own office. The majority of places I've worked before and since were in cubicle farms, with a few more open plan offices. I remember days where I would go to the office and, other than maybe running into people in the kitchen during lunch, wouldn't end up talking with a lot of coworkers. I liked the ability to do focus work, but it was easy to feel isolated. It might be different with modern collaboration tools like Slack and Zoom (and I guess, since I'm working remotely from a private home office, it clearly is different) , but if I wanted help from a coworker, it was either send an email or check to see if their office door was open and (if closed) go back and write the email anyway. I still sometimes see people talking about getting your own office as a sign of prestige; I don't see it. If I go back to an office, I don't want my own office. Cubicles and open spaces are great for me.