So I’m rapidly coming up on the end of my first quarter at the new job, and I’ve been planning to post my thoughts for nearly two months now. As it turns out, the past several years of being busy doing full-time school, teaching, consulting, convention planning, and raising a family was merely a warm-up for being really busy. Writing has, as usual, suffered.

So how am I liking the new gig? I am in love with this job. I was decidedly nervous at the prospect of making a return to so many things I hated in the past. I hate having a rigid work schedule—for me, programming is a creative activity, and I need to write code when I’m feeling creative. I hate writing code for other people—the last six or seven years have afforded me the ability to be selective about which clients and jobs I would take. I dislike working with project management teams—most project managers are not terribly good at the ‘managing projects’ part of the job. Finally, programming professionally is terribly time-invasive—employers have always demanded ridiculous hours and I’ve exhausted tremendous quantities of energy fighting on behalf of me and the teams I’ve lead for the right to sub-60-hour work-weeks and vacation time that involves actual vacation. While the interview process left me comforted, I was still pretty concerned about the possibility that I was walking back into the same situation again.

I needn’t have worried. In (almost) all respects, this couldn’t be more different.

In the first phone interview I took leadership roles off the table, choosing to focus on developer positions. While being “only” a developer meant a sizable cut to my salary, it still represented a comfortable paycheck; more importantly, managing a team of developers always came at the cost of being able to write code. (It turns out that the organization is flat enough that the leadership role probably wouldn’t have been bad either, but I still think that my decision was correct.)

The schedule is exactly what I need. Extremely flexible hours with a generous attitude toward working from not-at-my-desk. Provided I am reachable, make my meetings, and get my share of the work-pie done, the when and where aren’t all that important. For me, that means that I can go in very early and knock off a bit earlier as well. I can work and have time for family to boot! Madness!

I do not avail myself much of the opportunity to work remotely, though, because I genuinely enjoy the culture at work. I am used to seeing work cliques: the managers are upstairs, the project managers in that section, the creative folks all over there, front-end folks on one side of the office, back-end on the other…minimal interaction. It was like several companies working in the same building throwing work at each other.

It’s going to sound a bit cheesey, but here we really are just a single, big team. I really love the producers (which I still keep calling PMs) in my division. They are, by and large, the best group of them I’ve worked with. Working closely with the front-end folks has really boosted the quality of the work I put out, and the work that we generate as a team.

Even amongst the software engineers, the culture is more to my liking. I despise being on teams where everyone is working super hard to make sure that nobody thinks that there is something that they don’t know. It is needlessly stressful and makes for worse code. This is…whatever the opposite of that back-biting, paranoid place is…that’s what this is. Everyone is quick to answer questions; and they’re quick to ask questions too. As a developer, that sort of environment—the sort where a group of programmers will get together and all try to figure out some pesky quirk or weird behavior—is precisely the sort that I thrive in.

The best example I can think of to describe the culture here: early in my second month, my supervisor was on vacation for a week. We all put in some significant hours that week. Early one morning the VP of my group was walking by and just stopped and asked how I was holding up. He had seen that I had a posted some pretty big numbers to client work that week, and just wanted to make sure I was holding up okay.

Just like that…”Hey, how’re you holding up?“

And that’s the rule, not the exception. My whole supervisory chain is amazing. They communicate, they listen, they go out of their way to ensure that everyone knows that their contributions are appreciated. They are all genuinely concerned with people as well as product.

Frankly, I really enjoy the work. I hate working on a single project *FOREVER*. It gets SO BORING. Here, I have around 10 projects on my plate at a time in various stages of completion requiring different amounts of attention; and they’re all different beasts. Right this second I have a few projects preparing to launch, a few more that have launched in the last week or so, a few that are just beginning to gear up, two that I’m doing recurring maintenance on, and a smattering of small things that are currently in other hands and I’m working support on.

I am constantly engaged in programming that makes me think, in problem solving that keeps me interested, and in writing code that is honing an edge back on to some rusty Perl skills. The work was the part that I was most certain I would just be tolerating…I couldn’t be happier to be wrong.

That said, the one downside at the moment is that there is a LOT of work. I mean, a lot. Like, given my history of busy-ness, believe me when I say that this is the most busy that I’ve been in many years. We are short staffed, and while we’re trying to hire, they are pretty strict about making sure that those they hire are going to be a good fit for us. In the interim, it has made for some long, long weeks. It should be an indicator of how happy I am here, though, that I’m throwing out some 70+ hour weeks (while going to school) and still in love with this place. I end each week exhausted, but happy.

And there’s light at the end of the tunnel…help is on the way, and hopefully more help beyond that too.

Wow, I just skimmed what I wrote so far…could I be giving this place more of a hand-job? I’m going to stop now, so I can get back to work. I’ll try to get something less stream-of-conciousness posted at some point. Just know that I’m very happy with my choice. I feel useful, engaged, and appreciated.

And tired…lots of tired too. :)