I should have listened to the people recruiting me. I was not happy as a QA Manager at Lombardi, and I didn’t think I was particularly good at it. I got this email from a recruiter who had been pinging me for years. (As a matter of fact, he was the first actual recruiter I had ever talked to):

We are conducting a search for a very exciting company located in Silicon Valley. This company is building exciting, next generation system software.

The company’s founders and CEO are seasoned executives and have served at other successful companies.

The company currently has openings for Technical Leadership and Software Engineers at all levels. As a member you will play an important role building major components of a world-class highly scalable distributed system. You will make critical contributions in both team and individual capacities.

You will thrive in an organization with a strong culture of shared ownership, high-quality, innovation, and rapid development. Critical thinking skills and the ability to learn quickly are more important than specific technical skills or experience in our application domain; this position will not be filled by matching bullet-point technical skills to a rigid set of requirements. However, you will have mastered multiple software technologies and applied them appropriately.

Here is a list of our clients current resource needs:

There are 4 organizations that need people.

The UI group, Applications group, Quality Assurance and The Platform group.

We have listed the needs from the Platform group below allthough (sic) there are many postions in all four groups.

This was followed with a list of positions:

• 2 kernel/drive engineers
• 1 usb engineer
• 1 power management engineer
• 2 User-space software engineers
• 1 Java engineer
• 2 whitebox engineers
• 1 tools engineer
• 1 media/audio engineer
• 1 tools engineer
• 1 browser engineer

There are no management positions in this list. Looking at my development skills, which were now 8 years out of date, I was probably only qualified for 1 or 2 of these positions. But this is a prime example that the vast majority of tech jobs are for software development positions, and if you can do software development, and you can stay up-to-date on your skills, you can stay employed.

I missed this point in 2007; I told him that I was only interested in management positions.

Sigh.