I don’t remember how the recruiter from Texas Instruments got my number, but he called me, and we talked.

They had a development team in Dallas which was working on educational apps for Android and IOS, and the manager had just left, and they were looking to backfill the position.

Dallas is not my favorite place. Pretty much at all. However, I really needed a job, and it wasn’t California, so I proceeded.

He put me in touch with the hiring manager. She and I had a good conversation about software engineering, management, QA, release processes, and Agile. After 45 minutes of this we decided to setup a set of phone screens with people in the current development team to save me a trip to Dallas, and if that went well, I would go up there to meet the management team in person.

The phone screens went well. I talked to four people, two of which were fluent in IOS, one in Android, and one was QA. Of course, I could only talk in general principals with the Android developer, but it still went well. These were the last days of being interviewed without whiteboards. I had a feeling I might have to do that if I survived this round and had to go to Dallas.

So, I was told that they would make a decision about how they were going to proceed in a couple of days, by Friday that week.

On Monday, I sent out an email. And then on Tuesday. I stopped then, because I figured that they were not going to proceed with me.

On the following Friday, the hiring manager called me. She told me that TI had just sold these apps to a business in Korea, so the position was cancelled. I asked what was going to happen to the existing development team, and she said that it had not been decided.

It’s amazing how often major change happens with a team when the manager leaves. It often forces management to decide if the product is actually worth the business investment. Makes it hard to get jobs as a manager from the outside. And I did feel sorry for the team; they were probably out of a job. But I’m glad I did not move to Dallas for a team that was disbanded over time. That would have sucked.