indessed roscivs

Today was the second day at my new job. Well, it’s not completely new … I’m still at the same company, but in a different building, working for a different division, doing almost completely different things.

At first I was really worried. Am I jumping out of the frying pan, into the fire? How do I know the new place will be better than the old place?

And not that the old place was really that terrible. I had friends I liked hanging out with, and a lot of freedom to do development on whatever projects I found most interesting. But I never really hung out with any of my team members, and even the people I hung out with on the other teams weren’t really the sort of software developer types I had really enjoyed working with at my previous job. Add to this that management was technically incompetent and formed an almost impenetrable wall between our team and the outside world that made real progress towards solving users’ problems difficult at best—yes, it was definitely time for a change.

But still I wondered—would the new place be any better? When I had nervous thoughts like this, I comforted myself with thoughts of the sacks of money they were paying me to move. It wasn’t likely to be worse, I thought, so even if it wasn’t much better I’d still come out ahead.

But so far it has been better. The people on my team and the neighboring teams are talented, opinionated, and vocal. One of the things I really missed was having people who vehemently disagreed about stupid things like choice of operating system, development environment, or where to put the curly braces. It just seemed odd to be around a bunch of people who would happily use whatever was placed in front of them, even if it changed from project to project or from day to day.

It feels warm and familiar to have people who really care about the technology they’re using. (Even if, or perhaps especially if, they don’t agree with my own very strong opinions on the subject.) Random design discussions throughout the day, lunch conversations about what development methodologies are better, questions about roundabout ways of doing things just to stay in one’s preferred environment—these are the sorts of things that make me feel at home here.

I also feel like the problems scheduled to be tackled this year are very exciting ones—they match my strong points as well as areas in which I’d like to grow, and they match my interests too. I’m not sure how much time I’ll actually be able to work on these sorts of things (as opposed to the daily grind of less-enjoyable tasks), but at least the overall picture seems to line up well with my own visions.

I’ll keep updates coming as time goes on. After all, today is only the second day! (Not to mention that my new manager is out of town, so I’ve been enjoying a little more freedom than I perhaps otherwise would be having…)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 12th, 2008 at 5:32 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.