Moving to KACE

For almost ten years, I've worked for IntelliTech on contract at Wright-Patterson Air Force base. IntelliTech has been a very supportive employer, and my government boss at WPAFB (Ralph Ranard) has been an absolutely amazing supervisor; that's why I've been there so long.

This month, though, an opportunity has come up that I absolutely can't resist. I met Mike Gray and Tyler Gingrich of Dell KACE at Columbus Code Camp, which KACE sponsored partially to make contact with potential employees. (This, incidentally, shows excellent management right there. If you want skilled and passionate geeks, do you hire a recruiter to try to read the tea leaves of the self-promoting buzzwords of a huge stack of resumes? Or do you go to where the most passionate geeks congregate all on their own?)

Everything I've seen about KACE delights me so far. It's a subsidiary of Dell that has intentionally retained its startup spirit since its acquisition. Technical decisions are made by technical people for technical reasons - in other words, people are allowed to use the expertise they were hired for. (I know, that shouldn't be exceptional.) It's got a developer-centered culture that is a huge breath of fresh air. It's friendly to newer technologies and very friendly to open source. For example, I'll be taking over an important database currently in MySQL and migrating it to PostgreSQL. (Getting somebody to pay me for working with PostgreSQL has been a dream of mine for years...) And of course I'll be using Python. I'd wait tables before taking a job with no Python.

During my entire process of interviewing with KACE, it never felt like "job interviews" - those nerve-wracking, superficial, semi-adversarial dances described so depressingly in career publications. Rather, it felt like some long conference-hallway conversations between geeks - very real and very techie.

So... hello KACE! I'm delighted to join you!