Jobs

  I enjoy part of what I do in my job. I always knew from when I first played around with computers and made them do things that it was something I wanted to do that I could get paid for. With where I am in my career though, having been at this for quite a while and being a senior person I have to do a lot more than just write and design code.

  Take today for instance, I got a call from the VP (or whatever his title is) of our east coast offices telling me that one of the engineers that had handed in his notice. We had to work out who was going to take over this person's duties (especially since I originally wrote most of the code this person worked with almost 10 years ago), how we were going to reassign other tasks and all that boring planning crap. That kind of stuff with dealing with people really doesn't interest me at all but I can't not do it and stay in my kind of position and get the salary I do.

  Tomorrow I get to interview another candidate for a job here and given how awkward I am with talking to people I suspect I come across as some sort of reclusive quiet engineer. You can ask all sorts of the usual questions, throw in some technical know how probing but spending some amount of time with someone and then trying to come out of it with a judgment of them is tedious and not exactly something I am that good at.

  I like the security of what my job gives me even though the company is having problems at the moment so super long term there is no guarantee. However the thought of trying something else can be quite daunting. If I can't arrange somehow for me and my wife to move to a house where we feel secure and happy I know I'm going to have to find some other job where I can provide for us in the way I do know and we can move to a different area of the country entirely or even move country again since we don't have anything other than my job tying us down to this particular area.

  This post has just been me thinking out loud again. I now need to go look at something that is broken in the new code written by the person who is leaving and fix it. I do that a lot it seems although I have to admit when I first really started working on the code at this company I worked in a department where that was their entire function, fix the current code rather than write the new stuff so I've become rather good at it.