The great thing about keeping a journal is that it is a good opportunity for reflection. It has been a year since I bumped into the head of my department. He asked me if I was still looking for a new job (I was aghast that he knew). I replied that I was (curse my inability to lie). He said to expect a call from my boss' boss later that day.
Obviously, that ruined my entire morning. Was I about to get fired? Had people been complaining about me (it was at this time that I was asked to run my own project, which was close to its deadline, but wasn't even halfway close to finishing. (However, when it did finish, we blew our target way out of the water, managing to get processing time from minutes to milliseconds - go team!))?
Thankfully, my boss' boss is an early riser, so I was only in agony for an hour and a half. At 8:30am, I got the call. "Hi Fodder, we'd like to offer you a promotion."
Well, all that mental preparation I had been doing was suddenly made moot. What?!
"We think you've been doing a great job and you've shown the qualities of a senior developer."
Wait a minute. Something isn't right here. There must be some kind of catch.
"There's an opening for a senior developer in
(Whenever Intern Daniel or Michael want to push my buttons, all they have to do is say "bring people together" and I start to fume - something they seem to relish.)
I replied that it sounded like a great opportunity and that I'd like to think it over. So that was the catch. It felt like my boss' boss wanted me out of his team for whatever reason, and this was the fastest way to do it. I was pretty upset for a while, trying to work out what I had done wrong. MrBrioche told me to snap out of it. I wanted to leave, and this was a good catalyst.
I was quite reluctant to move to the other team - I had heard a bunch of horror stories from other people, and all of the people I was close to who had been in that team previously had left. But I had gotten the hint, my time in my current team was limited, so I reached out to everyone I knew and began talking to people about openings.
It's quite funny, because a couple of months before this all went down, I had a few people reach out to me and ask if I was interested in moving to their team. I declined, as I loved my team and wasn't ready to leave. Unfortunately, all of those positions had been filled, so that was a bit of bad luck. I had a friend externally tell me that they had a position open, but it wasn't a developer position, so I wasn't sure if I was ready to make the transition to a less tech-heavy role. I also found out that Michael's team was hiring developers, so I organised to meet with his boss.
I wrote down what we talked about, and what he said he was trying to achieve in the team. One of the things he said that interested me the most is that he wanted to put together an automated test suite. As cold as this may sound, testers shouldn't be there to press the same buttons over and over again. They should be the ones who create test cases that try and poke holes in the system, and some automated system should run those test cases. The idea of being involved in building such a thing appealed to me, but I spoke to some of the people on the team that I knew, and they all said such a thing would be a pipe dream. I opted instead to go with the team that it was originally suggested I move to.
It was a decision that weighed pretty heavily on my mind. When I hear about the cool things that they have done since then, I sometimes wonder if I made the wrong choice.
As I stated at the start, the great thing about the journal is the chance for reflection, and I've taken the list of things that I learned about the other team, and asked around to see how much of it actually came to fruition. I was pretty sad to learn that the thing that interested me the most got shunted to rot in the deep, dark corners of JIRA. Some things weren't able to come about because other things took priority. And, the thing that was making me fear picking my current team over this other team ended up being resolved in my current team, and happened to the other team.
I love my current team. Well, the work itself is not the most interesting, though I am learning about a lot of new things. My boss is really nice, and incredibly supportive. Plus, I get to exercise the criminal aspect of my mind with Jal, and that's probably what I enjoy the most about my team.
This is one of those rare moments in my life where I get to look back and feel certain that I chose the correct path in the crossroad. I've heard mixed messages about whether I really was pushed out of my former team or not, but in the end, it doesn't really matter as there's nothing I can do to change it now.
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