Job Change

After months of phone interviews, on-site interviews, resume touch ups and stress, Josh just accepted a new job today! Sort of.

Back in July, Josh started brushing off his resume and job shopping. He interviewed at a local company, which later extended him an offer of employment. The plus sides would have been a two-minute commute, a fun new project, change of (workplace) scenery and at least one great coworker (a friend of mine from high school). After weighing our options, however, Josh turned the job down and then spent weeks wondering if he'd made the right decision.

Our experience at another company was a little less straightforward. I've been bugging (I mean, encouraging) Josh to submit his resume to Google for years now. You know how I am about Google. "Enthusiastic" is hardly the word. I'm a Google geek of ginormous proportions. So we asked my brother-in-law, who works at Google, to submit his resume last summer. He did so and then called a while later to tell us that he had been approved for a phone interview.

I was thrilled, because I wasn't really expecting anything to happen. Google is ranked as the #1 Best Company to Work For because they have amazingly awesome benefits, like free gourmet food, massages, arranged transport to work to save on gas  (at the Mountain View location), and 20% of your work time that you can spend on other projects. I call that last perk "Build Your Own Resume" and I think it sounds awesome. Because Google is such a fabulous employer, they receive bazillions of resumes from people with very impressive credentials. They boast of hiring the Best & Brightest from places like MIT and Stanford. I know my husband is a freakin' awesome software engineer, but I doubted that it would come through on a sterile resume.

So we were thrilled and awaited the phone interview eagerly. And then we kept waiting. Finally, the day came. I was resting on the couch, trying to nap when the phone rang. I lazily checked caller ID (I never answer the phone.. sorry..) and saw the word "GOOGLE." I answered immediately and tried to play it cool, as if I wasn't completely thrilled to be talking to "Google." The recruiter told me how excited she was to talk to Josh and I gave her his cell number. She called him, had an initial screening interview and said she'd email him some information to look over, asking him to try to get it back to her as soon as possible.

In the meantime, she said she'd arrange a phone interview with an engineer. All day, I checked Josh's gmail account, waiting for the information to arrive so we could reply immediately. Then waited some more. Several days passed and the email never arrived. No word about when the phone interview would take place. We tried to call the recruiter and couldn't reach her. She didn't return our calls. All this while Josh was getting ready to interview at the local company. 

So, a week later, Josh was at an on site interview with the local company when I saw the 310 area code on caller ID. 310 is the area code where my sister lives.. the sister whose husband works at Google! I again answered eagerly, but got a surprise. The man on the other end said, "Umm I had an interview with your husband scheduled for 30 minutes ago but I can't get a hold of him on his cell phone." So after much hassle and craziness, Josh had his Google phone interview IMMEDIATELY after returning from an interview at the local company, and with zero time to prepare for the Google interview. The recruiter forgot to tell Josh about the interview! Argh!

He did the best he could and we eventually heard from the recruiter again. She said they wanted to fly Josh out for an on site interview and he would be contacted soon about travel arrangements. We were so excited! We couldn't believe this was actually happening! So Josh scheduled time off work and I started researching living costs in Santa Monica. Then we never heard from the travel people. It was a day before Josh was supposed to leave when we finally heard from the recruiter again. She apologized and said they'd changed their policies. They now required TWO phone interviews before an on site interview. So Josh had another phone interview, again with almost no time to prepare.

We then waited and waited (of course) to hear back from the recruiter. Just when I was convinced that they had ruled him out, the recruiter called and said they officially wanted to fly him out for an on site interview. (No, but seriously this time!) It had been weeks since we heard from her. We were excited and eventually heard from the travel people and eventually got everything all set up. So Josh flew out to Santa Monica and felt he did a decent job at the interviews. (When you interview on site at Google, it's a kind of marathon. They take you into a room and send in engineer after engineer to grill you about various aspects of software engineering and math. )

The best part of the interview was that Josh went to Portos the next day and brought home a box of pastries for us to share! Ha ha ha ha ha.... I'm such a geek, but it is tradition since my trip to American Idol.

During this process, Josh had started receiving a bit of "encouragement" at work to switch over to a new company within the same project. (Josh works for IHC, in a project building a next generation of software to use within hospitals. The project is a joint project between IHC and GE Healthcare, so although he works for IHC, he has a GE email address and is essentially paid for by GE, if I understand correctly. So he was being pressured to officially become a GE employee instead of IHC: same project, but the paycheck and benefits come from a different company.) He didn't want to agree to make the switch if he was going to be leaving the project altogether, so he hemmed and hawed and put it off for a long time.

I finally convinced him that if Google made him an offer, it would be better to lay it out side-by-side with an offer from GE and evaluate them together. So he finally applied at GE and got the ball rolling around the time he flew out to Santa Monica. A week and a half ago, he finally got the verbal job offer from GE and it included better benefits and a pay raise. He asked them to give him a week so he could see if Google was going to come through with an offer. 

I think it was that same day that he got a call from Google saying that they wanted to run him through one more phone interview. I thought this process would NEVER END! It was started to feel very frustrating and my research on housing prices in Santa Monica was not promising. Making the move to LA would require us to live in a small three-bedroom apartment, leaving our 4700 square foot home behind. (We rent out the basement, so we're not actually living in 4700 square feet, but it would still be a HUGE lifestyle change.) I was excited about the idea of living somewhere different, but I had an increasing feeling of panic when I thought about it.

Last week was horrid. The recruiter, true to form, wouldn't return Josh's calls. Friday came and we knew we wanted to make a decision over the weekend because Josh had promised GE an answer by Monday. Josh had communicated this to the recruiter the week before and she had promised to get back to us. Friday morning, gone... Friday afternoon, gone... almost. Josh finally got the phone call at the very end of his work day when we had given up hope. They weren't able to offer him the kind of job he wanted. They recommended he consider a different sort of engineering job, which he hadn't really considered before. He was disappointed and stressed to have to think through something so unexpected. We talked about it all weekend, stressed and felt very tense.

This morning, he decided to go talk to a fellow IHC employee to get some advice, before making a decision. It was a good and informative conversation and we talked it over afterwards. We made a decision and feel very good about it.

Drum roll please? Josh just accepted a new job at GE Healthcare and called Google to tell them he wasn't interested in continuing the process with them. He'll be at the same office, same coworkers, same responsibilities, same job... but get a pay raise and better benefits out of it. I call that a win-win-win situation. I'm excited for this slightly new chapter in our life. I'm excited he'll be working for a company that gives him sick time again. All of his PTO at IHC was used for sick days and we haven't done anything really FUN as a family in ... okay, never. Now we'll be able to actually save up some PTO and take a family vacation. In fact, we might do it "between jobs" to celebrate. Who knows?

So I get to stay in my wonderful home, in my wonderful neighborhood with wonderful neighbors. I will continue to live within 10 minutes of (almost) all my siblings and both my parents. I still get to gaze fondly out my window at the snowy peaks of Mount Timpanogos. I get to enjoy all the perks of a Four Season climate with sunshine in the summer and snow ball fights in the winter. I get to really be thrilled as the first little crocuses peek out of the brown dirt each spring, and bask in the gorgeous changing leaf colors in the Alpine Loop each Autumn.

And with a pay raise, we get to leave all that loveliness behind more often and travel to places that are ... nonUtahy ... but always know our home will be waiting for us after we've had our fun.