Hi blog. We don’t speak much, you and I. I guess I should have written about four dozen posts about this and that. They’d say things about moving to Southampton, or about my beautiful Loki-cat dying, or perhaps about change in work, or maybe even a bit on stuff I have stewing in the background around games development.
For the moment, all those can wait. Got a particular thing I want to share this evening and, for a novel turn, I’m going to post it publicly.
It’s annual review time again here at TSO. I don’t enjoy review time much. Somehow I always feel at a huge disadvantage. It’s almost as if I’ve worked so hard that I feel bound to get some sort of reward and acknowledgement and yet I’ve put in so many evenings and weekends that I’m too tired to account for myself properly in review. I think I don’t do enough preparation, partly in the hope/belief that my work speaks for itself. I get a good pat on the back but the actual package part of my review frequently disappoints me when I look at the effort I put in to get there.
So, this year, I’m putting in some preparatory work. Hurrah for me!
I went back into TSO saying that I didn’t want to do software development. Oh ho ho. What do I spend at least two thirds of my time doing? Yep, you guessed. Thing is, I clearly don’t hate it or I’d have found a way not to be doing it. In fact, I enjoy the rapid in-out work where I produce a single purpose tool or widget to solve a particular problem. It’s less stressful than than the thing I do best – which, for the record, is fixing problems that either have near-impossible timescales or everyone else has thrown their hands up in dismay over – but has some similar immediacy qualities to it, particularly in terms of feedback and appreciation.
So, madly, I’m forming a plan where I actually take on doing these small tools full time. There’s easily enough work to be done in that area and, as far as I can tell, it can pay for itself pretty easily either out of project budgets or out of efficiency improvements through accelerating other consultants. Besides, my response times are in hours and days, where the Solutions team is more like weeks and months, and I have a very clear understanding of what MooD consultants actually want, both through good requirements discovery and being a passionate MooD modeller myself.
I anticipate some resistance to this, though. Still, forming this sort of a plan is better than feeling miserable about working yet another weekend and having a strong suspicion that my review will not do anything to say “thank you for all your hard work” in any way that actually matters. I sense another pat on the back and then to be sent on my way as though that was sufficient.
I don’t doubt that this plan will do little to change the nature of my review but at least it will give me the opportunity to do work in a way that suits me better. TSO almost seems to expect weekend working, which is fair ridiculous. At least if it’s my work then I can choose it or not. In a big way, I have no problem working long or weird hours as long as I care what I’m doing and who I’m doing it for.
It’s like President Bartlett tells Josh Lyman in the West Wing. I paraphrase but it went something like, “See, I need to be The Man. But you, you need to be the man behind The Man.” I’m rather like Josh Lyman; I want to be behind something successful, a prime factor for its success, but ultimately supporting someone I like and trust who can be the frontman for whatever I do. There are a few people in TSO that I happily stand behind and support. This sort of a role would allow me to continue doing that for as long as I care to. And that sounds like pure win to me.
Now, here’s to hoping that I can actually make such a plan come together…
Current Mood:
Pensive
