I’ve taken a job at Intuit and I’m leaving Sun. Wow, I can’t quite believe it is real. The job is an exciting opportunity and I am very excited about all the new challenges, but I am very ambivalent about leaving Sun. I have been here for 17 years. When I started at Sun I had two little girls 3 and 7 and my last name was Brown. Now 17 years later my youngest is going into her last year of college and will turn 21 in a few months, and my oldest has just finished two years of teaching elementary school. My life has changed dramatically. Having been divorced and remarried my last name is now Vermazen. 17 years is in a very real sense a life time. My time at Sun has been an amazing roller coaster. A high point has been working with absolutely phenomenal people who just awe me with their creativity, hard work and intelligence.
One of the things about working for a big company is that you can change jobs but not change employers. I’ve been a customer support manager, a software development manager, a configuration management manager, a real estate IT manger, and finally the IT director for Sun’s iWork program. For most of these jobs I am very proud of what I accomplished. For a couple of them all I can say is that they were low points on the roller coaster and real learning experiences.
Sun is an absolutely amazing company that I will always be proud to have been a part of. I have almost always felt like I could make a difference here and I have never even for a moment doubted the reality of Sun’s high ethical standards.
Finally I am so grateful that Sun introduced me to blogging. Creating a blog and being a part of Sun’s blogging community has been so much fun. I think I am hooked for life and I just hope I can create a successful blog away from the warm and nurturing environment of blogs.sun.com. I don’t know how long my Sun Blog will be around.
Update 2018: Soon after Oracle bought Sun blogs.sun.com went away. I have hard copy of all my Sun posts but they are no longer available online.
Marion's Blog 
best of luck in the new job, Marion. change is hard, but usually a good thing. just subscribed to the new blog.
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Good luck. The biggest downside is that you’re probably going to be living in a Windows world. Perhaps you can persuade your new management that you need to live with the web interfaces to Intuit’s products, and then you can use a Solaris laptop or a PowerBook….
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Have at Intuit. I bet it’ll be an interesting shift moving from a more enterprise-centric company to a (pretty much) pure-consumer, non-technical market. What will you be working on?
Where I work is a Windows shop, but I’ve found that all you have to do is plug in your PowerBook, and everything just works.
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Cote’, Geoff, and Stephen,
Thanks for coming over to the new blog. You are right it should be a really interesting change. It is too early to comment on the change to working in a Windows environment. I imagine it will be a big change after Sun.
I can’t talk about what I will be working on yet. But I will eventually.
Marion
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