Thursday, March 18, 1999

Archive - 18 March 1999

Today I'll have my annual review. My supervisor will tell me what he's thought of my work for the last year, and how much money I'll be making this year. I've worked for 3GI for a little over three years, now, and I've had three raises, and they've all been very generous. I'm not worried about the money. Even if I don't get a raise at all - which is very unlikely - Matt and I have worked our budget for the new house based on our current salaries. Anything more is icing on the cake.

But part of the review process is that I have to fill out this very Dilbert-esque form, reviewing myself over the past year, and listing goals for the upcoming year. In the past, the goals part has always been sortof difficult. I didn't really have any goals. I was happy with my job, and I didn't want it to change. But it feels really dumb to put down for a goal: "To keep doing the same things I've been doing." So I'd Dilbert it up: "To continue to provide quality software solutions..." Like that.

This year, I found, to my surprise, that I actually want to do new things. I want to learn how to work with networks. As much as I love tweaking my website - I'd like to get involved with 3GI's company site and to work on web-based applications. I also think that, now that 3GI has more than twenty programmers, my primary skill (I learn new programming languages faster than anyone else I know - I spent a long time as a sort of de facto jack-of-all-trades) isn't as useful as it once was. So now I think my most useful skill, as far as the company is concerned, is my ability to create algorithms. Years of theoretical mathematics training at work. I'd like to work on some sort of design team that would figure out what applications a project needed, and how those applications would work (in a general sense) and then move on to a different project when that one has been figured out and turned over to the programmers.

I don't want to stop programming altogether, but I think my design skills could be more useful to the company than my programming skills. And I've found over this year that I get very bored with a project if I have to work on it for more than a couple of months. And the longer I stay bored with a project, the more irritable I feel about it. Only a month ago, I had to request that my supervisor move me to a different project because I was getting so fed up with the project I was on that I had actually contemplated looking for another job. Now, I know it would be practically impossible to find a job as good as this one. But that project had become so tedious that I literally couldn't see beyond it. Luckily, my supervisor was very understanding and promised to move me to another project as soon as the current phase was finished with the project I was on. True to his word, I'm on a new project now, and this one should only last about two weeks - and then I'll be on yet another project.

Yeah, I know, you probably couldn't care less about my career goals, but I'm sortof mentally rehearsing all the things I want to say when my supervisor gets caught up and calls me into his office. (That's something that annoys me. Meetings with him almost never happen when they're scheduled to. I was supposed to start my review fifteen minutes ago, and here I am, still typing away. I had to tell him already that I have another meeting at 10, so it may be tomorrow before I get my review. I hate waiting.

I fed a bug to my Venus Fly Trap plant yesterday. (Man, that's way too long. I need to name the plant something. What's a good name for a carnivorous plant?) A fake ladybug got into our office and was crawling around on Jeremy's window, so I captured it and put it in the dome over the plant. Matt and I watched it, fascinated, for about ten minutes, and then we went to lunch. It was still there after lunch, but I looked up from my work at one point and the bug was gone and one of the traps had closed. (You can still see just a little bit of orange shell peeking out of the trap.) So I don't have to find another bug for the plant for at least a week, maybe two.

I need to transplant it into a bigger pot, though. Some of the traps already brush up against the sides of its dome, and the information I have on Venus Fly Traps indicates that it could grow to more than twice its current diameter. But to do that, I'll need to find someplace that sells long-fibered peat moss. Shouldn't be too hard, but I doubt I'll find it at the local KMart.

Anyway, that's it for now...

No comments: