The last several days have been very exciting. To summarize, I had to decide between two very cool companies to choose my new employer, we bought a used compact car, and the family got sick with a stomach bug.

The Tale of Two Cool Companies

In December, when I was sending out résumés everywhere I could think of, I posted this message to the xmission.general newsgroup. I was hoping someone at XMission or a subscriber with XMission would have information on job leads.

At that time, I wasn’t sure I needed a full-time job. It was looking like Iodynamics might be able to provide at least half of my income requirements.

Two people responded to that message - each saying they would show my résumé around at their respective places of work and that they were hopeful.

Nothing happened for a while after that. I continued to send my information to companies all over the country with no responses whatsoever. It’s not a good time to try to relocate.

Then, on 27 December, I got e-mail from people at both companies.

The first company was Enterasys Networks and their Utah office is located in West Valley City near The E Center.

The other company was Lugh Networks and their office is located in Murray.

I ended up interviewing with both companies within a couple days of each other around the first of January.

Enterasys Networks makes all kinds of networking technology. The Salt Lake division does high-end routers and switches. They were looking to fill an engineering position working on their next-generation routing/switching platform. The job entailed C programming in a Unix environment for embedded systems.

Lugh Networks is a startup company run by some people who have already had success starting up other technology companies and running them profitably before being bought up by other organizations. They have two products close to production. One is an ethernet over powerline technology for home and small-office networking. Very cool. The other is a Java-based VPN solution called DeltaGuard. They are also working on developing a third product which is Linux-based and that’s what they were talking to me about.

After interviewing with both companies and receiving a warm response from both, I was leaning toward Enterasys as a preferred place of employment because they seemed much more stable than Lugh Networks. They’ve been in business in the Salt Lake area for five years and have a pretty good number of engineers working there.

Lugh Networks, on the other hand, was a startup. If I took the job there, I would be number two on a two-person team doing development on a product that had not shown any success on the market yet.

When Enterasys made me an offer, I told Lugh Networks that I had an offer from Enterasys and I told them I needed a salary somewhat higher than Enterasys’s offer to consider a position at Lugh Networks. I tried to quantify what I felt was an additional level of risk and responsibility and apply a dollar amount to it to come up with the number I gave to Lugh Networks.

I didn’t hear back from anyone at Lugh Networks for a couple of days (Well, I did tell them this on a Saturday) and was beginning to feel comfortable preparing to report for work at Enterasys when Lugh Networks called me and said they were willing to offer me what I wanted.

I was completely shocked.

I met with Lugh Networks again and discussed their offer with them. I asked more detailed questions about the company and the product. I compared their benefits package to the information I received from Enterasys. I talked to other people who worked at Lugh Networks.

Then, on 15 Jan, I made the decision that I would be stupid not to go to Lugh Networks.

A New Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Knowing I was going to be commuting to Salt Lake City on a regular basis, I needed to get a second car — preferably something which did better on gas than my Subaru (which does about 25 MPG).

I looked around for a 1994-97 Nissan or Honda compact that didn’t have too many miles on it and didn’t cost too much.

In the end, I purchased a 1997 Mazda Protege from Menlove Dodge Toyota (they’re website is pretty nice, IMO). It does pretty good on gas, had 64000 miles, and runs good.