New gig, exiting in good faith

If you read this week's InfoWorld column, you'll notice some interesting personal news under the headline "Exiting in good faith":

Over the past four years, I've spent a lot of my time advising CTOs on how to manage their careers both in this column and on my Weblog. In my very first column, I outlined what I think it means to be a CTO, and since then I've walked you through my day-to-day trials and tribulations, hoping that reading about my successes and failures would be instructive -- maybe even entertaining.

This week, I'm going to broach a topic that's among the most important to any CTO's career: how to exit your current job gracefully when an irresistible opportunity comes along.

As with all my columns, I'm writing this one from experience. After my final column next week, I'll be leaving InfoWorld to accept a new position at Yahoo, hanging up the CTO hat I've worn for the past seven years in favor of something completely different (see my blog for more details on the new gig)

As of the end of this week, I hang up my InfoWorld CTO hat and take a little time off before joining Yahoo! Search, working in the new Technology Development Group led by Bradley Horowitz. I hesitate to describe exactly what I'll be doing since this is such a fast-moving space and I haven't started yet, but I will quote Jeremy Zawodny (one of my new colleagues and someone whose work and voice I have long admired) to give you a hint:

Among other things, we'll be working with Marc's team [more on Marc Davis here. -CD] and many others to investigate, evangelize, prototype, hack, and generally encourage the development and use of new technology and ideas.

With the news out of the way, it's been such a fun ride at InfoWorld that I had trouble shrinking the experience into a final 600-word column, which is why I appreciate InfoWorld letting me stretch my parting material out over two. I was also able to collaborate with the editorial team here to help develop a replacement column that I will definitely be reading (more on that in my final column that runs online a week from today, and the following Monday in print).

In parting, I have to offer a sincere "thank you" to everyone at InfoWorld and IDG for being great to work with over the past four and a half years, especially the Technology staff. I am very proud of the IT team I built at InfoWorld and fully expect them to keep everything running smoothly in my absence. When people asked me how I managed to run IT and keep up a demanding writing schedule, they clearly weren't aware of my secret IT weapons: Derek Butcher, Kevin Railsback, Chris Lin, Wade Grubbs, and Baldwin Louie. Thanks, guys!

I also have to thank the community of InfoWorld readers who have made the public-facing part of my job a blast. It would be a privilege to know just a handful of you, but I was lucky enough to get to know many of you and made some lifelong friends in the process. I'd like to give a special thanks to the CTOs who always carved out time to give me advice and help me do both my writing and IT job better. I sincerely appreciate it.

Look for my final column next week, of course, but this will be my blog farewell. I'll be continuing my blogging elsewhere (with very little enterprise IT content, though -- you still need to visit InfoWorld for that).

See you around the web! Posted by Chad Dickerson at August 2, 2005 06:30 AM