The Logic of Leaving the University

I love the University of Minnesota, my department (Academic Support Resources), my team, and the incredible technical communities I'm part of.  I've pretty much spent my entire adult life at the University as an undergrad student, employee, and graduate student (1999-2013). Despite all of the great things about working for the University, I've decided that I want to do something a bit more entrepreneurial; perhaps a startup, freelancing, etc.  For this reason, I put in my 3 week notice to leave October 4th to leave ASR as an employee to pursue other opportunities.

In a nutshell

I'm leaving because the job I want does not exist. If it did, a job posting might look something like:

Wanted: Seasoned Ruby on Rails developer to contribute to open source projects and communities that can help make higher education IT more efficient. 

There is nothing I enjoy more than technical community building and creating tools to optimize the developer experience. So I figured I'd leave the University and see if I can find a job that that requires these skills.

In more detail / a few parting thoughts

I wasn't planning on this. Since May, I've been enumerating different internal options to find a way to do the things I enjoy doing most and make the changes I believe need to happen.  It turns out, that right now, it is not the time for the University to move in this direction. Instead of elaborating on the particular things that influenced my decision, I'll simply state a few recommendations I was working on pitching in hopes that others might consider adopting or challenging them.

Open source operational IT innovations

Universities should stop protecting their operational information technology IP and recognize that by proactively sharing it instead, there is a potential that technologies could standardize, operating costs could decrease, and places like the University of Minnesota could shift IT resources to focus on real technology differentiators to leverage, compete, or partner with rising technology stars like Coursera, Udacity, EdX, etc.

Build IT communities that span across multiple institutions

I also believe that by adapting and applying UMN-IT's community of practice development model to building inter-institutional open source communities, many higher education institutions could mutually advance their respective operational excellence (OpEx) initiatives: 

By open sourcing code and investing in community development, universities could accelerate the commoditization of operational technologies and reduce the costs of maintenance to make room for work that matters.

Institutions should NOT open source everything--just the mundane infrastructure oriented stuff that provides little potential for competitive advantage or strategic differentiation.  I am talking about things like configuration management tools, ETL, and data integration tools.  I am talking about most of the operational innovations that come out of internal technical communities like Code-People, DevOps, the IDEAA group, or other informal communities. Many institutions are solving the same complex and expensive operational IT problems over and over; open sourcing their solutions would bring down costs across the entire system.

Create a policy framework to make staff open sourcing easy

In the same way that traditional technologies being developed and licensed by the Office of Technology commercialization typically require a business plan of some kind, perhaps a similar framework could be constructed to streamline the open sourcing process.  Instead of a business plan with 5-year revenue financial projections, maybe it would be a 2-year technology roadmap and community development plan that sets targets in terms of numbers of users & institutions. Maybe it would illustrate how 1) money cannot be made off of it, and 2) why sharing it would do more good than harm. Something to make it easier.

I wish all the great people I've worked with at the University the best of luck and look forward to the next time our paths cross.