Somewhat random thoughts
Posted : Saturday October 17th, 2009

I've been having an interesting but mostly good experience at my new job. As a person with lots of contracting experience previously I've seen a real mix in the ways company operate internally. My new company is no exception and there are both good and bad things I see. Basically on the plus side there is good product and people with good experience, on the down side process management needs improvement. The latter has been frustating both to experience and witness a bit at times because like anything I do I am invested (in many ways) in my job so I like when things go efficiently. However, this issue was also one of the reasons I was hired.

Specifically focusing on the technical things are going fairly well. I am still positive about delivering things as advertised and on time but there are some elements of unknown because frankly there are aspects of what is being developed that have never been done before. And there are always little hitches you don't anticipate. A small example from this past week, the IT staff (who have been good and responsive) are configuring the servers (staging and production) and we hit a small snag when I decided to yank Apache from the chain and just deploy on Tomcat. It works fine except that I forgot about the privledged port restriction on Linux so a bit of time was lost to work around that.

Outside the technical I have been getting plenty of positive feedback from people and that's really nice. It's always nice to be appreciated although I also know that besides having lots of experience and knowing what I am doing I also do work very hard so I don't exactly feel it's undeserved praise. At any rate there is already concern being expressed then when initial development is complete I remain happy. As in, what will I want to do, what will it take, to keep me once the initial development cycle is complete?

It's an interesting question because among other things it's a question I haven't really asked myself much. To be honest the project needs to be a success for me to stay in the long-term because part of my compensation is tied to sales and my compensation needs to be more competitive. But beyond that I really hadn't thought much.

Now is not a time for me to spending a lot of time dwelling on it because I have a lot already on my plate, but it is proving interesting food for thought.

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future  life  work 

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