spinoff

I've been at the same company for a decade now (!!!) minus seven months for our Grand Adventure in 2011-2012.  From 2014 through the summer of 2019 I worked almost exclusively on speech recognition for use in cars.

Nuance is famously acquisitive (Nuance_acquisitions_after_merger), buying up almost every speech competitor smaller than the big names like Apple/Microsoft/Google.   However this last year things went the other direction and they spun off our automotive work in to a new publicly traded company called Cerence.  While I was on leave I checked in with a coworker and learned of the impending split, but the catch was that we spent three or four months not knowing which people would go with the automotive work to the new company.  In the end, my project went but I stayed, so now I'm doing similar work on other speech domains.  From the time I came back to work in March until the middle of the summer, most of my times was spent training new Cerence people.  It was a massive undertaking to divvy up knowledge, tools, people and responsibilities.

Here's a slightly futuristic video promoting the new company.   Spoiler: it concludes with a flying car.

Last year we got a new CEO after 13 years of the same leadership, so in addition to the spinoff, a lot of other things have changed at work. We have better benefits, and new perks like charity matching and volunteer time.  The leadership is working hard to change the company culture as well and most of it has actually impressed me, though it would be easy to write it off as corporate mumbo jumbo.  

Oh, and since August I've been full time remote, which means I go in to the office one or two times a month when there's a good reason to go in, and I no longer have my own cubicle.  Fine by me!