Joining the Newspaper Division is certainly a tactic that could be beneficial to all involved, but it is not without its own risks. The pros: * For the Newspaper Division - had I been in the division, I suspect classifieds would have been developed at least a year earlier. Rather than debating issues of capital/expense, roles of PowerOne, etc, my salary would be a constant and it would have been merely a matter of strategy. Perhaps, instead of having to go through the entire Project overhead, we'd decide what to to do and do it. * For Operations and Engineering - they get a familiar, known quantity on the outside, whose demands and expectations may be a little more realistic and whose development properly leverages the infrastructure that SITOE provides. * For me - I get a situation where, perhaps, I don't have to wait for permission to improve things, to speak my mind, to help someone out. Consider: * If they had taken my original advice, the image feeds would havebeen where they are going now, two years earlier. They would have saved support costs and the costs of a contractor working on a CORBA solution that after a year was scrapped. ( Estimated savings $200,000 ) * They would have never allowed the code problems over which Gaul and I had our falling out - the same code that has now been removed, a year later, saving them the cost of a second feed machine, licenses, etc. ( Estimated savings $50,000 hardware + $30,000/year maint) * They would have deployed an appropriate XML feed workflow based upon XSL/T which would improve debugging capabilities, encapsulated the translation logic in platform independant XSL, and helped migrate the feeds from schema to schema. ( Estimated savings: hard to say. When all of your enterprise is married to a particlular schema, costs go up everywhere as it becomes obsolete ). But there are also cons: * For the newspaper division - I'm not cheap and they lose a SITOE insider. Also, I fear that I am sometimes a PainInTheAss. * For Operations and Engineering, they lose an asset that could have been leveraged across many customers. * For me - I expect I lose potential salary. I join a much more reactive division. I lose say in SITOE. I'd definitely not be able to help out any other division. 09/09/2002 - I spoke with Bob a bit. We're basically on the same page. He doesn't want to take over managing me. He does want a developer twin. I liked his turn of phrase when he said he wants "developers steeped in his realities". Odd - he wants say in my pay and bonuses. Can that be a good thing? I think the Newspaper side would like to penalize the tech side in a lot of cases and I would be a convenient whipping boy for that. Also, he's been drafting a proposal and discussing it with Bryan, Oscar and Ed. I really don't like people discussing my future without me present. I need to make it clear that I am not just a web developer, in fact, I am more interested in the back end of the web than the front end, and I am more interested in unix than windows architectures. So, having a dotted line to Bob while remaining in the syseng group is going to be more ideal.