XR Trading

 Aaron started looking around for a new job at the beginning of the year. He had been at Raytheon for 8 years and felt like it was time for a change. After several months of interviews, he found himself drawn to high frequency trading companies. They use the same kind of technology (FPGAs) that he has been working with, so it would be the same kind of work but in the finance industry instead of defense. 

One head hunter reached out to him about a job with XR Trading. Aaron initially said he wasn't interested because the company only had a few reviews on the job search sites, and they weren't great. They convinced him to interview anyway, which involved a zoom call, a rapid IQ test, an at home technical test, a technical interview, and then a cultural interview with the whole leadership team. The technical interview happened while we were in McLean at my parents house- he barricated himself in Blake's room with a bunch of referece sheets he printed off. 

Aaron was very impressed by them from the moment he was in contact with them. They ran things really well, and everyone he talked to was super confident, friendly, and laid back. They are a small company, around 100 people, with a hardware engineering team of 5 people. They are headquartered in Chicago, but most of their team is remote. Their small team is very competent but chill.  

Aaron was offered a job at XR a couple days after we got home from the beach. It launched quite the emotional roller coaster. The first day he was ecstatic, just over the moon excited. But then he started thinking about leaving his current job and wondering it was the right thing to do. He scoured the internet for other red flags and found some people on reddit saying things they disliked about the company. He coped by doing a researching frenzy and talking to Mary a lot over our Payson trip. The stress manifested itself unexpectedly- he was super sleepy all the time, and he got nauseous every now and then. This is interesting to me because these things used to happen to him in college but went away when we moved to Arizona. I thought that he started being able to stay awake through sacrament meetings because he was getting more sleep, but now we think that it is because working is less stressful for him than school was. 

Anyway, he decided to accept the job! He was still pretty stressed for the first few weeks when he was trying to get up to speed on everything, but now that he has gotten into the swing of things he's back to being his non-stressed self.  

His first day of work with the freaking huge monitors they sent him

Aaron loves working from home, and his impressions of the team have all been correct. He always chafed about all the regulations and paperwork that came with working for a huge government contractor. The process for getting new software at Raytheon was to fill out a bunch of paper work and then wait weeks or months hoping that it gets approved. At XR, he asked for it on a Slack channel, and they had it installed 10 minutes later. There are fewer meetings, faster turnaround times, less waiting around for aprovals. It is a better fit for him. 

About a month into it, they flew him out to Chicago for a week to meet people in person and see the office. It was a good thing for him to go to check it out. He said that there were lots of people there who came into the office for the first time in over a year to meet him. It confirmed to him that he's not missing too much being a remote employee since not much goes on at the office. They took him out to dinner, and he enjoyed exploring Chicago. 

Look at this city slicker

What did we do at home while Aaron was gone for a week, you might ask? Well, it looked a lot like this:

We ate quesadillas for dinner and wore underwear on our heads (well that last part was just Elliot)

Our countdown chain! The end of the chain is Christmas, with Daddy coming home, Thanksgiving, and Elliot's birthday featured along the way. Annie is in a phase where she angrily says things like "But how LONG is 3 days" so the chain has helped her. Annie had cried the whole way home from the airport after we dropped daddy off. The chain definitely helped her wrap her mind around when he was coming back. 

This water fountain was the most fun part of the playground. My kids were all drenched from the homemade splash pad. We made it outside and around other people every day which was good for my sanity. We also started watching a show called Phineas and Ferb during dinners which helped a lot with morale. 

Daddy is home! His fanclub talked him into sitting in the backseat with them. We sure love him and are glad that he normally works upstairs where we can drop in and say hi throughout the day.

This is probably the place to mention that Aaron got called to be a counselor in the bishopric in July. He was only in for a couple of weeks before we took off on vacation and missed church for 4 weeks in a row. To avoid feeling like Jonah running away from his calling, Aaron zoomed into his bishopric meetings from assorted balconies and bedrooms in 4 different states. 

Between the new job and the new calling, it has definitely been a time of big changes for Aaron. He's pulling it off well!