What kind of job I'm looking for

First, my background:
- I have a BS in Computer Engineering from the University of Washington, which is a pretty good school for CS (it's often ranked next after Berkeley - around the 5th / 6th best school in the country when I graduated).
- I have 6 months experience as a software development engineer intern.
- Since graduation, I have worked in the test discipline.
* Nine months as an Software Test Engineer contractor at Microsoft (MS) (working for Volt)
* One year as a Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) contractor at MS (working for Volt)
* Eight months in current position as MS SDET in Internet Explorer
- I may be making a career switch to development - but need to conduct some informational interviews first to learn what QA outside of MS looks like.

I'll post a link to my resume once I get around to updating it.

So the first thing I actually need to do is to conduct informational interviews at various companies to see what their 1-2 years experience test development and entry-level software development work is like. I've heard that testing outside of MS is very different, and I'm not sure I'm interested in a test career outside of this company.

Right now, what I need most is contacts for informational interviews with software development professionals and software testing professionals in a variety of companies. I will not be looking for a job in these interviews - rather, I will be trying to decide what kind of company I am interested in working in, and whether I want to continue my career in software testing or make a career move to software development. If I spend time on unemployment, I will *need* to make contact on specific jobs, so I should use this time to figure out the big picture information I will need to make those contacts useful.

I am especially interested in companies that match any of the following points:
- Are in or very close to Everett
- Have great benefits, especially health benefits
- Are concerned with making the world a better place, either by directly working towards that goal (like Catholic Charities . . . but I don't think they're hiring for my role right now) or by taking steps to give as a company and encouraging giving and volunteering by their employees (MS does a great job with this)
- Are full of enthusiastic, active people who really love what they do
- Have room for flexible schedules for employees (like 7 to 4 schedules instead of 8 to 5, or "just get the work done and be here from 10 to 4" - like at MS)

I'm still working out what my needed and desired salaries are. I'd prefer full-time work with a great company, but contract work at a company that I *think* is great would be OK if I can find a good, small, personal contracting agency.

Yeesh. Re-reading this post is giving me the shakes. It's very real. The only thing I've been through in my life that had a similar emotional impact was finding out that we were expecting twins. Of course, my first reaction there was happiness - but then I started reading about the health risks and challenges, and I was really roller-coasting emotionally for a while, between excited anticipation and fear. Here, the first reaction was being upset - but the roller-coasting is pretty similar. As long as I keep pushing forward when I'm feeling optimistic, I should be able to coast through the down-periods and just focus on prayer until I'm ready to get back to work again.

I know other people who have been through similar problems before - so that's an advantage over the twin pregnancy. I can talk to friends who have been through this before. Obviously, it's not the end of the world. The really scary parts of job loss are fairly far down the road - a lot of things have to go wrong before we're really in trouble.