Now that I've been back at IBM for a couple of weeks, the questions are starting to roll in regarding my impressions of the gig and how I like it. Since I happen to have this nice blog here which is quite useful for putting out general all-points bulletins that pertain to the Drewverse, I figured I'd just write out my impressions here and y'all can read about 'em at your leisure. So buckle up, buttercup, because the train's leavin' the station and we ain't turnin' it around anytime soon.
Honestly, I'm not really sure what to make of my current position. On the upside, I'm learning a lot and have been challenged pretty much from the get-go to work out my brain on a daily basis. I'm learning some good skills which will make me pretty valuable in the future: J2EE, WebSphere, DB2, Struts 2, DWR, dojo, perhaps some Hibernate, and all sorts of other acronyms that I don't even know the meaning of yet. And, I'm doing full site development from the ground up, and that will be really valuable as well.
The downsides are that I feel like I'm constantly chasing after the bus that is supposed to take me to school; I don't really know the technologies I'm being asked to work with, and it's taking me a lot longer than I would like to grasp the ideas. My team is almost 100% remote, even the ones here in Austin - I and one other woman are the only ones that come into the office on a regular basis. Therefore, it's not only hard to connect with my teammates on a personal/social level, it's hard to catch up on the development side of things because I can't just go next door and bug one of the other devs to sit down with me and help me out. People don't respond too quickly to instant messaging or email and NetMeeting and phone conferences can only take one so far and thus, I think I could really benefit from an hour or so of XP coding until I get my Struts 2 feet under me and really get a better feel for the nuts and bolts of the application that I'll be working on half of the time.
(As an aside, the reason I'm in the office is because my manager has a three-month "probationary" period before working from home. I guess he wants to ensure that I get going rather than work from home and have to battle potential distractions, which I completely understand. The odd thing is that nobody else is in the office, which leads me to feel slightly more isolated than I would feel if I worked from home because IBM is not comfortable. It's kind of a terrible work environment. I would understand the requirement a bit more if everyone was in the office, but since they're not, I'm kind of constantly wondering why I have to go in. I could potentially be more productive at home, having access to more computers and/or monitors.)
So, the summation is that it's hard work and it's challenging, which I like, but it's also somewhat isolating and frustrating because I'm not able to adequately get the help and contact which I believe that I need right now. I've been a "software developer" for twelve years now, and yet this is the first time that I've really been able to do what would be considered full-on, hardcore development work. I still need help because in this respect, I'm a n00b. This does, of course, lead to a lot of inner monologues and haranguing of myself about what I should and shouldn't be able to do and how quickly I should be able to pick it up, and that's probably not helping matters much. I really don't know what the expectations of me currently are, and so my mind has gladly made up extreme possibilities on its own; all I know is that I'm getting tired of reporting that I'm still stuck on the same form I was last week on our daily status calls.
We've just started studying Ecclesiastes in my home team and I'm really trying to put those lessons into practice by not worrying so much about the end product and just taking each day for what it is and trying to live it in the moment. Hopefully, this pattern of thought will help the next two weeks to get better and the two weeks after that to be even better still. God has put me here for some reason, and so I know that I have the capability to do the job, but maybe I need to ask Him for a little more help this time than I have in previous stints. I just don't really like that catching-up feeling, which is the situation that I have found myself in for the last two weeks, so I must learn to deal with it and, hopefully, overcome it sooner rather than later.
And that, as they say, is that. Aren't you glad you asked?
