Well today January 19th, 2006 is my eighth anniversary (or 56 years in dog years) at Autodesk although I feel I worked for them long before they hired me. Hard to believe as the time has flown by. It seems like just last year I was a mechanical designer living in Portland Oregon in 1998. Eight years ago I was contemplating a position with the then pre release 1 Autodesk Inventor team that had an office about 4 miles from my home or taking a position offered by then Autodesk Beta Mgr. Jeff Allen in San Rafael California . I chose to take the San Rafael position as I really liked Jeff and the position offered and moved to California. I have truly enjoyed the experience and have been challenged all eight of the years. One nice perk is every four years Autodesk employees get a six week paid sabbatical to go on vacation and come back refreshed and with new energy as two weeks of vacation is not sufficient to get full disengaged IMHO.
Now Eight years later I have just recently relocated and now work from a remote home office enjoying the beautiful Utah mountains out my window and am looking forward to the future years with Autodesk. I stand on the shoulders of many giants at Autodesk as my fellow employees are the best in the world. No wonder Autodesk was just ranked as one of the top 100 companies to work for by Fortune Magazine.
Now the big decision is what will I do for my sabbatical…another Amazon Jungle trek, New Zealand and Australia pub crawling, Thailand or Indonesian exploring, camping all over the US, or just relax around the new house. I will give the sabbatical possible plans some thought over the long flight I have coming up this weekend to Asia.
Cheers,
Shaan
