After nearly eleven years at Avaya/Lucent/Mosaix/ViewStar (strung together by two acquisitions and a spin-off), I’ve decided to move on to Voxify, a speech applications startup in Alameda. My last day at Avaya was May 7th. The killer blow for me was that this month Avaya is moving the R&D team from the Dublin office to the Milpitas office. I could already barely tolerate the 25-mile commute to Dublin. I was seriously dreading the 40+ mile commute to Milpitas through the extremely nasty traffic on 238 and 880. I dread no more.
Fortunately for me, near the end of March I ran into a fellow physics and philosophy major at Rice who recently started working at Voxify. Once I learned that Voxify builds sophisticated speech recognition applications for automating customer service calls, I was intrigued. After learning that the development work is in Java and VoiceXML for deployment on Linux servers, I needed to get an interview. After learning how smart and cool the people there were, I was sold.
Starting the first week of June, I’ll be the lead architect for applications. While VoiceXML development started out as a hobby for me a couple years ago, I was able to turn my contact center automation development and architectural work at Avaya into an architectural role on a new VoiceXML-based platform. I’m very fortunate that that experience helped me get an opportunity to focus completely on building speech recognition apps with a co-located development team.
While I greatly enjoyed my time at Avaya, working at a 15,000 person company with over 2,000 people in R&D spread out over the US and a few other countries can be a little distracting at times. It makes sense to try to leverage the work of all those developers, but I’ve learned just how hard distributed development can be. The December/January 2003-2004 of ACM Queue had a couple of excellent articles on distributed development, though, of course, no silver bullet.
I’m not sure how you solve or avoid the problems of distributed development at any software company that large. Building a very large company organically at a single site takes a very long time. Acquisitions are almost always required to build large companies, but it often happens that the companies you want to acquire are nowhere near your current office or offices. Obviously, you could try to force everyone to move to a single site, or at least to a very small set of sites, but you will inevitably lose a significant number of key employees who don’t want to relocate.