I’ve received word that I’m being laid off at the beginning of January, 2025, after a bit over six years with LGS-then-CACI. When the product I worked on the most didn’t generate the anticipated sales, and the other projects I worked on didn’t provide enough billable hours, I was given until January 2 to find sufficient coverage. Finding coverage that soon will take a Christmas miracle, since after this week, everything pretty much goes dormant for the holidays.

To CACI’s credit, they stated explicitly in my termination letter that this was not in any way based on job performance. They also actually used the term “laid off”, and not some nauseating euphemistic weasel words like “involuntary separation from the payroll”, or, “adversely affected by the company’s rightsizing effort.”

If you’re looking for someone experienced in pretty much everything having to do with software development, from applications to operating systems to turnkey systems of both software and hardware, we might be able to help each other.

Irrespective of what’s being developed, there are parts of the development process I’m better at than others, and parts I enjoy more than others. Of the various roles I’ve had, this is how much I’ve enjoyed them, most to least:

1. Software configuration management/DevOps
2. Development lab system administrator
3. SDLC planning and policy
4. External and internal documentation
5. End user training and curriculum development
6. Regression test frameworks and automation
7. Mainline product development
8. QA and QC planning and policy
9. Mainline product testing
10. System engineering/requirements

Although I’m at least competent at all these things, I’m really good at the top five, there presumably being a virtuous circle between things I enjoy and things I’m good at.

You can see what I’ve done over the decades by looking at my resume.

My enumerated list of skills is a cure for insomnia, unless you’re a keyword-matching bot. That list, including skills that someone at my level should have but for some reason I lack, is here.

One other thing: Every project I’ve worked on after my teens has been Unix- or Linux-based. (During my teens it was Apple DOS and CP/M.) In the 1990s, I worked on two commercial versions of Unix itself. Conversely, I have never written so much as “hello world” on Windows. I can administer Windows systems to a point, and I’m pretty fluent in Office, Project, and a bunch of other common applications that run on Windows, but if you’re looking decades of Windows development experience, I’m not your guy.

Here’s another piece of bad news: I absolutely cannot relocate. My roots here in New Jersey are just too deep, and I have a daughter who commutes to college from home. Working on-site full-time is fine with me as long as a normal commute from Bridgewater is no more than about 45 minutes each way on a normal day. Travel up to 25% is fine, too.

Thanks for reading this far, and thanks in advance for contacting me with any leads you might have.

I am Ed Horch. I have owned this domain since 1999. Stephanie Schulz is my sister. Now you know.

I’ve received word that I’m being laid off at the end of September. It was a good run, almost eight years, but after Nokia bought Alcatel-Lucent and then systematically moved as much work as possible from the US to Europe and China, the US locations have experienced massive layoffs. It’s finally my turn.

You, dear reader, and I might be able to help each other. If you’re looking for a software configuration management or DevOps type of person for your medium to large Unix/Linux-based development effort, you’ve come to the right place. My job is to take what your developers write, ensure that all the right parts are in all the right places, build exactly what is expected to be built as soon and as quickly as possible, and get it sent off for testing. Ideally, the process to do all that should be as automated as possible, and should not place unnecessary bureaucratic roadblocks in front of people who are just trying to meet their deadlines.

The set of resources that make all this possible includes hardware, and having been a system administrator for a number of years, I can specify and build out the hardware you’ll need, too.

Of course, any build system needs to run in as little wall-clock time as possible, and that cannot always be done by throwing more hardware at it. I have tuned the build scripts, the existing hardware, and the operating systems for maximum performance.

My resume will tell you the specifics of what I’ve been doing over the last 30+ years. You can find it here: http://www.horch.org/resume.docx

I know there’s a lot of interesting work out there that isn’t SCM. I’ve been a developer, a tester, a sysadmin, a project manager, a lab architect, and enough other things that if you’ve got non-SCM work that my skill set still fits, let’s talk.

I don’t clutter my resume with an enumerated set of skills and technologies, so I’ve appended a list to this post. As with any such set, I’m stronger with some than with others, everything from a bit of experience as an end user, e.g., VMware or OpenStack, to products I know well enough to rewrite from scratch, e.g., ClearCase. I have at least passing familiarity with a lot more than what’s listed here, but I’m only showing what I’ve used on the job. If you’re thinking, “This guy looks good, but he’s got no Python/AWS/Rails/MacOS/whatever,” don’t worry; I’m a quick study.

Now the bad news: I live in central New Jersey. That is not going to change. I simply cannot relocate, for a large number of reasons. I would also like to keep any commute to 45 minutes or less, unless I  can work from home at least part of the time. Life’s too short to spend sitting in traffic.

Thanks for reading this far, and thanks in advance for contacting me with any leads you might have.

Keywords: C, C++, Korn shell, bash, Perl, Java, ant, HTML, Unix, Linux, HP-UX, BSD, Solaris, Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, GNU make, Hudson, Jenkins, SAN, NAS, NetApp, RAID, ClearCase, SCCS, CVS, Git, Gerrit, Jira, Docker, ClearQuest, VMWare, OpenStack, VNC, GNU compiler toolchain, Wind River, Apache, Configuration management, Release engineering, Sanity testing, Continuous integration, Windows, Windows Server, RDP, Active Directory, NFS, NIS, DNS

Most people would say the graphic rape scenes or the suicide, right? Not me.

For me, it was two snippets from the tapes:

“You’re different. You’re good, kind, and decent… And I would have ruined you.” That was me, in my late teens and early 20’s. The best thing my crushes did for themselves was friendzone me. (Still friends to this day, in a surprising number of cases.)

“It’s the end of tape 13. There’s nothing more to say.” Empty hallway. If she walks through that door, which we know she will, then it’s over. That’s her suicide, really. We still see the flower on her backpack, from a time when decorations mattered.

After enough years that I’ve literally lost count, I’ve moved my horch.org vanity domain off of Hyperreal, where they’ve let me freeload all this time. For that, they get a HUGE thank-you from me.

I moved to Bluehost, because it scored near the top of the surveys I read, and because there’s an affiliate link for them at coverville.com (tied with Night Vale as my favorite podcast), and I wanted to throw a few bucks their way.