Mr. Responsible Guy

I thought I was doing well and kicking ass, sorting through some chronic problems, and with two other work mates, I even had a pet project underway that, if successful, would be the key to getting to SDE II.  Today my manager scheduled a meeting with me to shoot all of that down.  Apparently the way we were developing our pet project was against a bunch of policies that I think are lame, and he has serious problems with my tone in emails and the way I handle problems and engage other teams.  Oh, and I'm scrum master.  He doesn't like how thats going either.  Come to think of it, neither do it.  Being scrum master sucks ass.  I only did it because I hated how the other guy was doing it.


Marketing

I learned a long time ago to stop telling girls exactly what I think.  For example, if you discover a misunderstanding between you and your girl as to the nature of your relationship, do not ever, ever, ever explain in crystal clear terms exactly what your understanding was.

I need to start doing the same thing at work.  I loved being candid and straight with people, but my current boss hates it.  My current boss is the person I need to impress in order to move to SDE II.  SDE II is the position I need to move to within a year or so if I don't want to get fired.  The company I work for has a sort of move-up-or-get-out policy, which is unfortunate because their idea of moving up sucks.

So...for the time being I will now become "Mr. Responsible Guy," and just like when I talk to girls, I'm going to start asking "what do these people want to hear?" at work.  Hello bullshit.  Hello politics.  Hello passive-aggressive behavior.  Hello kow-towing.  Hello murky, vague, guarded responses.  Hello simply holding my tongue. Goodbye snarky responses on tickets, funny emails, getting to the root cause of problems, trying to make an argument for solving what I believe are large, systemic problems that are wasting hundreds of hours of SDE time, or fixing our shitastic on-call situations.

From here on out, all I want to be saying are "its done" and "I fixed the glitch."  Except I'm not actually going to say "I fixed the glitch."  I'm going to say whatever politically correct thing they want to hear.


Moves

I looked into internal transfers.  The company I work has an unexpectedly dumb policy:  if the team you're on is not working out for you...if your manager is giving you bad reviews, etc...you are not allowed to move teams.  Fortunately my reviews are always good, although after all the shit my manager gives me about my "communication skills" I'm sensing a bad review coming, and if I transfer internally, I'll need to get that done before he fucks up my escape route.

I looked into the open positions my company has in New York City.  They are more boring than what I do now.

My next stock vestment is February 15th.  I reeeeeally want to get that stock.  I actually want all of it, but a bad review could start a downhill trend that outs me before I can get it all.

Looked at other internal transfers briefly.  Nothing jumped out.  Such a transfer would bear a high cost of adjusting to a new team, and I would still be in Seattle.  I would also get my hands on the rest of the stock.  Tough decision.

Startups

In my current job, we are expected to work super long and super hard and super smart.  We are expected to not have a life and do lots of work on our own time (until today I had been doing this).  Here's an example of something I work on.  My team, A, discovers a problem:  team B's service is timing out.  They claim its not their responsibility, though, so after a week or two, I now have four teams:  A,B,C and D, who all claim it is not their fault and they don't own fixing it, and I'm being asked why I'm trying to fix a problem.

I would prefer to work somewhere where I can pour some passion into coding.  And where no one in my personal life ever hears me say the words "I'm on call that night."  I think that I would prefer to work at a startup--lots of new code being written.

I don't have any great ideas, though, so I'm trying to find people that do.  I signed up for a mailing list that Rob pointed me to.  There have been no posts.  Started searching the web...not finding much yet.

Other Ideas

There are some more...creative lines of employment.  I've heard of this job where you get trained on how to drive Ferrari's and then go around teaching rich people how to drive their Ferrari's.  Tells girls in bars that I am a "Ferrari driving instructor" would be even better than saying "I work for [large online retailer]."

Something else I was--oh I just got paged.