Back to Corporate life, but this time in SA

Because of the economic downturn Lené and I decided to send me back. Back to the evil dungeons of corporate life. In other words; a real 9 to 5 job. I haven’t worked in corporate since leaving the UK in August 2006. Everyone knows corporate has its bad aspects, but by-and-large I enjoyed the environment. Some people hate it, but I seem to do well in it.

Once the decision had been made, I was expecting to wait a while to actually start working. Not so, luckily. Lené’s cousin’s husband referred me to someone at Dimension Data, probably South Africa’s biggest IT company in Port Elizabeth. After a few to-and-fro emails I managed to secure an interview. I have done many many interviews and am very comfortable doing them. In the UK I was so good I would go for 4 interviews on one day and get offered them all by 5pm! Anyway after the interview they said they liked my skills but they had nothing right then. Fair enough I thought. But about 2 hours later I got a call asking when I could start! The rate was obviously not as high as I would expect in the UK – where I made serious money. But I am pleased with what I got.

My first job was to jointly build 83 Infopath (for Sharepoint deployment) forms for Sabco, a major Coca-Cola bottling company. It was something I hadn’t done before, so there was quite a learning curve. I was nervous about impressing my new slave masters (so to speak; they’re actually dead-nice), but in the end I think I did OK and I expanded my skill set. It seems DiData was happy as well as they’ve offered me another contract; this time with Volkswagen. And best of all this time it will be in C#, which has been my bread and butter for many years. I can honestly say I think I’m not a bad C#/ASP.NET developer. Time will tell I guess!