Living

My first 8 months at this job have been a roller coaster of seemingly intractable technical problems, breakthroughs, and finally being appreciated for what I am truly capable of. It’s been enjoyable and infuriating, and I’ve come to a number of conclusions. I’ve likened it to Ender’s Game, where ender is constantly tested and pushed past the breaking points, but continues to succeed because he is incapable of failure. Sometimes my perfectionist side does get the best of me, and in turn completely destroys any semblance of balance in my life… But I’m constantly learning new things that (surprisingly) I’m pretty good at, and getting to know myself and what I want better than ever before.

Been talking to myself forever / and how I wish I knew me better… — “Oceanlab - On A Good Day” — That’s how it goes.

The huge revelation: build an army, and trust them to do things right. As someone who considers himself a true engineer in terms of thought processes, I am capable of thinking up and designing solutions to huge problems that work well, I am not a one man army. I can solve any problem give an infinite amount of time, but the problems I work on and have priority don’t work like that. I’ve already learned to think on a huge scale, now it’s time to learn to make it real, and learn to manage the resources (human, vegetable, and mineral) that go into the process.

Second revelation: When customer ask questions of us that are accusatory in nature, either deliberately or just asking if something is wrong on our end when it is not, are not personal attacks. If the customers had any clue that they were the ones doing something wrong, they’d probably not do it. But then again, this is the way I think, and I am fully aware that there are lazy, incompetent dumbasses who like to hide their faults by blaming others. Those are not my customers, or at least not that I’m aware. What makes the whole thing infuriating is that as an engineer, the only answer is that it works perfectly. Not “fairly accurate”, “most of the time” or “well”… but flawlessly. When my mistakes cause trouble tickets to be generated, this makes me very angry, as it is a personal failure. When the customers think I made a mistake, but in fact they were the ones in error, they aren’t blaming me… they simply fail to see their own mistake and have to be shown in a polite and courteous manner.

Third revelation: Dan was right when he said that all that matters at the end of the day are results and relationships. When the customer is getting good service, that’s good for everyone. When you build this social bridge with customers, it only makes your job better. I already empathize with the needs of my customers, in fact it’s one of my strengths — but when the bridge is built, it becomes a two-way street. The customers understand that we have their best interests in mind despite how long any given problem may take to solve, this understanding in turn smooths the day to day bumps and bruises of running Blackboard for so many customers. This is confounded by the fact that (apparently) I’m very good at writing business e-mail, and the command of the English language that my mother worked so hard to beat into me is serving me well in ways I’d never imagined. Working with people is easier, although it can be infuriating when the other party/parties are not on the same level of cognitive horsepower that I am. I’m learning to deal with that, and realizing that it’s out of my control.

Fourth revelation: I am and will forever be a hardcore tech person. If I move to a managerial or more administrative role, the part of me that has to tinker and explore and mess with things will either get shifted to hobbies (at home, photography, hobby programming, robotics, offroading, whatever.) or will continue to be available at work for the intractable problems that nobody else can crack, or when something has to be done on a truncated time table and work perfectly — because that’s what I’m good at.

So where does this leave me? I don’t know… I’ll keep hacking away at UC until I have reason not to.