Transition

Recently, I changed jobs.

In order to protect my ability to say whatever the hell I want without consequences, I'm going to cleverly disguise the identities of the companies.  Lets just call them Flabazon and Bikesoft.

I showed up at Flabazon thinking everyone was a genius.  I was thrust into a complicated software migration, not yet knowing that was a way of life in that department, and found out that my team has an "on call" that is always dealing with problems, and who gets woken up in the middle of the night by a pager.  And sometimes the entire team needs to help.  Then I was introduced into a complicated build system with the terrible property that any time one of its tendrils touched your project, nothing would work until you completely integrated your shit with the entire build system.  I spent years developing the skills to fight that battle.  Working at home was extremely difficult.  It took a lot of investigative work, charming the IT department, and buying a $1000 laptop from Apple to get a situation where I could work from home effectively.  In three years I never managed to get email on my phone or even be able to respond to pages on my phone.  Work was so boring I spent considerable portions attempting to find a polynomial-time solution to 3-SAT, just to keep my brain from dying.  I should have been programming regularly, but work was so tedious that by the time I got home I didn't have the mental capacity to work on side projects.  Also, the team that I was on was largely responsible for a business-logic level codebase, and for fixing other people's problems.  Management came down hard on us because other people were not fixing their problems.  The "other people" I refer to were often in other organisations and, knowing that we lacked leverage, completely ignored us and our escalations.  I doodled through meetings, fought to hide my disdain for our position because I knew my brand new manager would chide me later.  One of the things that my brand new manager told me was a business version of the alignment chart, where on the bottom you have people that lack ability, and on the top you have people have have ability.  On the left you have people unwilling to learn, and on the right you have people willing to learn.  He told me I was top-left:  I had ability, but I was unwilling to learn.  He talked as if this was supposed to be some kind of revelation to me.  After being shoved off on the losing side of a team split because I happened to be familiar with some bullshit, I had actually spent the last least 2 years doing my best to remain strategically ignorant of all of the moldy, rotting systems I hated; I was sad only that I'd been caught.  Flabazon's performance management system turned out to be different than what they presented at first...their "career management" sessions were really just masturbatory self-flattery that obscured the true machinery of the business until I got my foot stuck in it and couldn't move teams.

Then I left Flabazon and got a job at Bikesoft.  At Bikesoft, my team owns platform level code.  Platform level is the opposite of business-logic in that it doesn't suck and make you want to kill yourself.  At Bikesoft, my primary job will actually be writing code, and adding features.  In three and a half years at Flabazon I spent one month actually adding features to something.  Now I will be doing it all the time!  At Bikesoft, I am not a member of an unloved team with a revolving door of managers.  My team has no "on call" and no pager duty.  No one acts like you are committing a mortal sin for desiring to not be on call.  On my first fucking day in the office, I had corporate email and calendar on my personal fucking android phone.  It was painless, and took five minutes.  Five minutes is 0.000643% of three and a half years.  I don't know much about Bikesoft's build system, but it doesn't suck, and I've never really liked Bikesoft's software anyway, so I just gave in to everything and used it without complaining.  The department I'm in functions much like a start up.  My manager's manager told me, up front, before I checked in a single line of code, how their performance managment and promotion system actually works, so that I can make good decisions.  Also I have my own office.  I can close the door, and I'm actually not bothered by anyone.  And I worked all day.  All day.  Like 9am to 8pm, and I still had energy left over.  Also, Bikesoft is not super-fucking-cheap ("frugal") about everything.  I have a computer that is actually powerful enough to do things like run software, and I have my own fucking office.  At Flabazon, even the president of the United States has to share an office with someone.

I am certain that I will become frustrated and jaded about many, many things at Bikesoft.  However, so far is looks like whatever my future frustrations will be, they will be new and completely different.

And this time, I know how to play the game.