Watershed

End of another year, so time for a bit of an update for anyone who still checks in on my blog...
I haven't been posting anything for quite a while because nothing of note has been happening in my world.
Last post I made covered what Id been doing with my summer off... I didn't really choose to take the summer off but there was no contract work available so it was a more or less compulsory vacation.

I was anticipating going back to work on a planned new contract in about mid-August but a couple of weeks before I was due to resume work, the company called and let me know that they no-longer needed my services... and I wasn't the only one... They had a big ":restructuring" (as these things are called these days) and they were letting go about 150 full-time employees as well as all the contractors.
That was a bit of a bummer for me but I'm sure it was a lot worse for the other people they fired.
And so I was at a bit of a loose end...

But then a few weeks later it turned out that I got another call from the company saying they were interested in my services again... They had come across a significant issue one of their released products and had no spare people to allocate to the investigation (they just fired a bunch of "excess people"... Anyway, it was a product I had worked on before and was well qualified to do the work, so a new contract was signed and I went back to work more or less exactly on the schedule I had initially signed up for.
And the work went along pretty well (it was quite interesting debug work) and it expanded a little into another product (that used the same design and so had the same issue) and it ended up taking a couple of more months to deal with... And then there was a new issue on a different project and since I was already there and on contract, they decided to keep using me for a bit longer and that took another month or so and all in all I ended up working through till mid December... which was great from my point of view.
But now the issues are down to where they can meet schedules with their full-time staff so Ive finished up for the year.

...And it may be that that's the end of the line so to speak for contracts there...
The industry is "consolidating" it seems and over the last three months or so the company that I was contracting to has been the subject of a bit of a bidding war. And it seems that the company will now definitely be bought (the deal is scheduled to close in about a month or so).
And the company that is doing the buying will definitely be looking to realize a great deal of "synergies"... which is the currently in vogue euphemism for making lots of cuts in projects and employees!  And while a lot of cutting will of course be directed toward administrative and logistics functions that the new parent company already had and knows what they are doing (so why duplicate those functions), there will also likely be changes in the business directions and the particular engineering projects that Ive been working on may well not have a future with the new company and so my services may no-longer be required even temporarily...

... But its been a good run while it lasted and I'm glad I got to work in this contracting role for as long as I did. I think it was about eight years all told, and I spent about three of those years riding around several continents on my motorbike which I cant imagine having been able to do with any other form of employment (for my skill set anyway).

Now I don't have any real idea of what the new parent company's policy toward scalable work-force is and it is possible that there would be future contract possibilities with them, but I should assume that the "good ol days" of reliable contract work are probably over for me and I'm now going to have to find a regular job of some sort...
And that is I admit a bit of a daunting prospect... There's lots of work for young software people these days but its not easy finding a new job for a fifty year old electrical engineer with a hardware back-ground... I may well have to change field altogether but I'm gonna take the next month off over Christmas before I start looking seriously.

But it may well be one of those watershed moments when our lives take new directions that we would otherwise never have predicted... We shall see :)