Interesting

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That is how I would describe the last eight months. I was hired as a contract employee at a software shop where I used to be the manager, and it was interesting.

This takes some background explanation, back in 2005, I was a young, foolish forty-two-year-old with a fresh MBA just chomping at the bit to start climbing the corporate ladder. I was working for a reasonably large company — around a thousand people, but I thought I had advanced as far as I could in the short term. I was a Software Supervisor. Directly managing a team of seven software engineers and reporting to the software department manager. What I wanted was my bosses job, I wanted to be a software department manager to be a Director of Engineering or Chief Information Officer within five years. I was going to go places. Man, I was an idiot.

So, I started looking around and found what I thought was a perfect position. A Fortune 500 company that was looking for a Software Engineering Manager reporting to the Director of Software for the whole company. It was a move to a new city. But that wasn’t a problem since my wife, and I had already been talking about moving. So moving to another city wasn’t a big deal.

To shorten a long story, after a four-month process, I ended up as the Software Engineering Manager for Company XYZ Automotive. I had no idea what I was walking into, first surprise the company had done a…