Two weeks ago I posted this:
To clarify my earlier oblique message: I'm among those laid off at ModCloth today (+1 week). Looking forward to what comes next!
— Chris Winters (@cwinters) October 17, 2014Weird times. Some folks will be there through mid-December and I sure do wish them well, along with the company. Even though I was only there just shy of nine months I learned some new things (Go, payment processing, e-commerce, Ansible, Docker, MySQL), met some great people, and got to work on some useful and interesting projects.
ModCloth is fairly well known, and word spread very quickly about layoffs. Unfortunately many of the recruiters in the Bay Area missed that a lot of us are in Pittsburgh, so lots of my responses had firm and unambiguous wording about my desire to stay in the area.(1)
But I was really fortunate to have solid interest from a few local folks, and one of the places that impressed me off the bat and never stopped was Lightside Labs. They have a really nifty technology and are passionate about helping kids learn to write. Their next challenge (or set of challenges) is integrating their technology with a company (Turnitin) that just recently bought them.
I’ll join the team as Principal Software Engineer starting tomorrow – Happy Halloween! I not only get to learn Python, but I get to work in a domain that my wife knows quite well (teaching writing).
And the team is growing! There are spots for QA folks, front-end developers, and designers. Let me know if you’re interested!
More soon…
(1) I actually reply to every inquiry I get from recruiters. Sure, there are terrible and unscrupulous people in the industry. But most of them are just trying to do a pretty difficult job, and I think it’s worth giving them the benefit of the doubt.