The factory I've been working at for the past nearly 5 years recently opened up a couple of IT positions and I got one, and I start this week. I had only ever planned on being at this place for a year since that's how long I thought it'd take for the site to pick back up enough for me to generate a full time income from the site again. That of course never happened and 4+ years later I'm still at the same place. More recently I was doing some job searching and considering just pursuing a career that wasn't Vizzed and not long after this place opened up those 2 IT positions, which is something I was hoping they'd do for as long as I've been there.
The place I work at is in town and I've been working weekend shifts this entire time. This allowed me to focus on Vizzed during the weekend and also allowed me to be at home with my kids while they're home schooled or out of school during summer break (I'll be sending them back to public school most likely though). I've got a lot of anxiety in general and driving into an over populated city, which is where all the jobs are nearby (Twin Cities to be exact), just wasn't something I wanted to do so it's awesome that I'll be able to finally be utilized where I work.
The reason they finally opened up IT positions was because a company bought out the company I work for and so the IT guys from the company that previous owned us left and now the new company needs a new team. It's a Taiwanese company and our place makes circuit boards and this is their first factory in the US. They basically want a fresh start on everything and this gives me the opportunity to bring to life all of the ideas and visions I had for the place (those ideas being shot down in the past due to me not having a title worthy to do such tasks). I'll basically be in charge of everything software related. It's going to offer me a lot of opportunity to not only utilize and keep fresh the skills I have but also allow me to further develop those skills.
Anyways, here's how this affects Vizzed. I'll be working more hours than before and I'll also be working primarily during the week. I haven't had weekends off with my family in almost 5 years so I'm excited to have that with them. Because of this, I'll be doing very little development during the weekend and I'll be doing very little development during the week. They're going to allow me to have a very flexible schedule so I'm going to try and have it so that I have 1 day off during the week with that day being the day I work on Vizzed, which will hopefully be Mondays.
In other words, I'll be spending and investing less time on the site. Earlier in the year I was averaging around 25-30 hours on the site, lately I've been investing on average of 20 hours. Now I'll probably be investing 10 hours into the site so I have to make that time count (some weeks might be more). Thankfully I have an awesome staff so they'll definitely save me a lot of time which will help me focus on things that only I can take care of. If the site ever picks back up again, and enough to generate a full time income, I would for sure quit my job and focus primary on Vizzed again but until that happens, I'll have to just deal with spending 10+ hours on the site a week.
There are 2 positives that come out of this at least.
I'll be obtaining skills potentially beneficial to the site which might give me an opportunity to do things on the site or for the site that I wasn't capable of before (you know, maybe I'll develop the skills to make my own RGR Plugin or to be able to work on the current).
The other positive (kind of 2 actually) is that I'll be making more money at my job and this means I'll have a budget to host competitions again with cash prizes (not as big of a budget as in the past but a budget none the less). I eventually stopped hosting competitions due to the lack of participation and the lack of participation was a combination of less traffic on the site (and therefore less interest) and no longer having the budget for cash prizes. So I'll definitely be hosting competitions more often. Having a budget again also means I can invest money into various scr
ipts for the site and also hire people to work on various things.
If you have any questions for me, let me know in this thread:
https://www.vizzed.com/boards/thread.php?id=103865
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