I had settled into Coverity late in the year, but was still getting solicitations for low-paying QA jobs in the middle of nowhere. However, occasionally, a more interesting email appeared in my Inbox, despite the fact that I was pretty happy.

Good Morning!
I am an IT Recruiter and my client (Lexmark) is looking to hire a Build Release Engineer.  Lexmark (www.lexmark.com) is located in Lexington KY.  They offer a full relocation package which include the purchase of the home.  Please take a minute and review the job description below and if there is an interest – please send me your resume in a word document and I will contact you regarding this opportunity.  I have also included a cost of living calculator as well as some links to the area.

There are some interesting things to unpack here. First of all, my wife’s family lived a couple of hours from Lexington, so this would put us closer to family. Secondly, they offered an incredibly generous relocation package (they would buy and sell our existing house!) Lombardi did not do any relocation, we footed that large bill ourselves. And the cost of living would have been quite a bit lower. She went on to describe all kinds of Lexington facts, with links to the Better Business Bureau, newspapers, airport, etc.

As for the job itself, I was presented with requirements for Linx, Perl, Python, C, Make, shell scripting. Knowledge of building code. Development experience in distributed, multi-process software. 3-5 years of most of those.

And this:

Must have distributed systems and multi-process, multi-thread systems programming experience

Highly Desired:

Database design and application development

OK. I could do this job.

But I did not want to do this. Lexmark did printer drivers. This was not interesting software for me to work on. And while Lexington is pretty, I really did not want to move, and my wife and I liked where we were raising our kids.

And, if something happened, and I lost my job, I would be in Lexington, not in a place with more tech jobs like San Jose or Austin or New York or LA.

I’m not sure if I responded to this one or not.