Furloughed

There’s been a lot of movement in the Navy around software factories, and my team has been part of it. Basically, some form of higher-ups did an audit and said that there were too many software factories with too similar of workloads, so the overall number needs to be reduced. They were broken up into Enterprise or Mission specific- so something like the Air Force’s Iron Bank that can handle most software builds (especially in the microservice world) and ones that are decalred Mission Specific are too customized for their target environments, like if the target is special hardware and the “pipeline” process came about before the standardization we’ve been seeing over the last 20yrs or so.

Because of this churn, there have been budget changes and cuts have been made to my contracting team. Our Option Year was supposed to start in November, but some changes (I won’t get into here) coincided with the Federal Furlough and our contract couldn’t get approved. There apparently was some writing that basically said “You don’t get paid till we get paid” so we’re not back till the Federal Budget gets approved, unless some money is reallocated.

At this point, I’m basically on a sabbatical!

Ngl I’m pretty stoked. I have some house projects I’m looking forward to (new roof) and some side-business things I’ve been wanting to dive deeper into as I’ve found that my career progress is slowing drastically- the demand for SRE’s is decreasing, the number of applicants is increasing, and the offered salaries are decreasing. My current position offers almost no upward mobility, so something’s gotta change while paying a hefty mortgage for a very nice, but too-small-for-kids house.

I’ll try to post more throughout the process- both here and on X. I’ve posted on linkedin that I’m open to consulting gigs as well.

TTFN, Scott