Category Archives: Work

A Dive Into The Abyss

So, as it turns out, my bitch­ing about my self-review was unnec­es­sary. Mon­day, Octo­ber 22nd, I quit my job. I actu­ally almost did it the Fri­day before but wanted to make sure I wasn’t mak­ing a rash deci­sion (as if detest­ing each minute you spent at work for the past 4 months could ever be

It’s the Most Wonderful Time, Of the Year

Does that lit­tle jin­gle make you think Christ­mas? Well stop it, it’s not what I’m talk­ing about. Hal­loween nei­ther even though it’s a great lit­tle hol­i­day. No, I’m talk­ing about review time. That time dur­ing the year when the review fairy comes down from on high where she’s been hang­ing out with Jesus and John

Taxonomic Job Classification

I have decided that you can clas­sify jobs on a tax­o­nomic basis, i.e. every job is just like some liv­ing creature.  I have also decided that my cur­rent job is like being a old, stately oak.  In a drought.  Where your leaves die.  And then a limb or two.  Then slowly, your heart and soul

When Interests Diverge

I ran across this inter­view with Joel Spol­sky today and while it’s all good, I found one part of it to be really eye-opening as it relates to my cur­rent job. That insight is that if, as a soft­ware devel­oper, you work for a com­pany that isn’t a soft­ware shop (I work for a com­pany

Chances Are It’s You That’s Stupid

In my expe­ri­ence in the soft­ware devel­op­ment world, peo­ple tend to have one of the fol­low­ing three reac­tions to a new tech­nol­ogy or process: This is so stu­pid. I can’t do this, please do it for me. I don’t under­stand, can you help? You can learn a great deal about a team mem­ber or employee just based

Why Less is More

The more I work in IT, the more I real­ize how insight­ful the Pareto prin­ci­ple really is.  While it doesn’t apply directly to IT, it cer­tainly rears its ugly head here a lot.  For exam­ple, to this day, years after a cer­tain devel­oper left who shall remain name­less to pro­tect the guilty, we have code