Wow, a lot’s happened in the past couple weeks where I work. The biggest thing for me personally was that I got a new job! I’m still working at Polycom, but I gave up my job as a QA Manager to become an engineer again. I’ve been doing technical management for 9 years now, and I decided about a month ago that I would be a whole lot happier at work if my work was more “hands on technical.” You see, I haven’t been very satisfied with my job the past several months, and after lots of soul searching I realized what the major reasons were. First, I’ve been spending too much of my time doing administrative, bureaucratic stuff. With 13 direct reports working on 3 or 4 different projects, the bulk of my work has been going to meetings, budgeting, planning, etc. Second, I found that most of the fun I’ve been having at work has been living vicariously through my software test engineers. It’s gotten to the point that when they tell me about some problem they’re trying to solve or some achievement they had, rather than thinking “good job” I’ve been thinking “wow, I wish I was doing that.” So, I made up my mind I need to either manage a much smaller group (so I have time for hands on type work) or go back to being an engineer.
I was prepared for either route, and had come to grips with the possibility that my boss may not feel he needs another QA engineer, in which case I’d have to go work somewhere else. But, fortunately, he was very cool about the whole thing and was able to create a new position for me working on a super secret project. So, I get to keep my tenure at Polycom, but I also get a chance to learn a ton of new technical skills. Because I’m coming onto this new project before there’s a whole lot for me to do, I’m going to have some time to learn some new programming languages, shake out the cobwebs on my Unix skills, and so forth. So far, it feels really, really good. For starters, I’m learning to program in Ruby and I’m learning about web services and testing web services. Later, I’ll learn Java, the latest XML tools, SOAP, and so on.
In keeping with my newly rediscovered geek side, I set up a Linux machine at home (which I think I already blogged about) and am setting one up at work as soon as I can get the hardware.