Last day at standard

For my final act while working at the standard I have written a script the software engineering division is afraid will crash the servers (but did impress my boss), stacked a large assortment of papers to be thrown away and deleted all the files on my hard drive.

Pardon me while I reflect a bit: This has been a very good job in the sense that it has paid well, been flexible to my schedule and the people hear are fun to work with (meaning the immediate team members). It has been a pain in that folks here a generally working against the rest of the company when it comes to getting things done, and the software environment is crap. There are two trains of thought that I have boarded at my first job with a big company.

First is the role of managers. At PSU my manager believed her job was to set the priorities for our little team of nerds, provide us with the necessary tools and resources to maintain the school’s infrastructure and after that she basically just ran interference for us with all the politics that went on among the higher-ups and other departments. It was a great team to be in because we could do our job, provide vital services to faculty and students without having to worry about politics much. At Standard on the other hand we have a very different managing style. Or so I thought at first. It often seems to me that we are at the mercy of the other IT departments, software engineering, the system admins, production services, etc. But I think now that our manager really is doing his best to make work easier and more efficient (even if he is a little overboard on time tracking and metrics) but in the end we are “users� of the other IT groups and they have the authority to demand we do things a certain way. It kinda sucks and as one person said, they are a services division, they are supposed to provide service, but that’s the way it is. And I think the only real difference in managers is this one’s detachment from the team. Not as much fun but I have learned to live with it.

Second, I thought of today how the physical environment here affects my thought process. I find it very hard to be creative during the day. I spend most of my break time surfing the internet and almost all my good ideas have been thought up while on the bus ride home or on a walk around the building. I only just put my finger on the reason today. There is the obvious: cubes. But I think I could even deal with grey five-foot prisons if only it wasn’t so darned air-conditioned! When I drive I let the windows down, I’m the first to put on sandals when spring comes ‘round, as soon as I get home I open all the windows I can. I like fresh air, we are lucky to have it here in Portland. Somehow it stimulates my imagination. I can think of a thousand new ideas on a short bus trip and have not a one all day in my cube.

I will miss seeing all the cool glass buildings down-town, the view from the eighth-floor windows and the fun folks I have on my team.

My hopes for the future are to find out the difference between salaried and hourly paid worker’s mentalities, to do “real workâ€?, not spending my days trying to find ways around petty rules made up by groups detached from the revenue generating users of the company, and to not get bitter if don’t. 🙂