Results tagged “consulting” from BrainDrain

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?

I find myself playing the waiting game once again where it comes to employment. I talked with my contract fixers last week and caught wind of a potential three-month contract, but haven't heard back from them since; I'm not sure if that means that they're still gathering information or if the response from the requestor put the job parameters outside my defaults for acceptance. In the meantime, I've also submitted a writing test for round two of the interview process for an awesome writing/blogging job and I'm anxiously awaiting the status of that. I would really like to have that job and I'm unsure if the "no news is good news" adage applies in this situation. It's been a week and a half now, so I'm getting antsy - however, it was close to a month before I heard back from them on my initial application, so maybe they just move slower than the tech industry light speed to which I am accustomed. It is also quite possible that God is using this to teach me yet more patience and with that in mind, I'd better settle in and relax for the long haul.

But I'm not just sitting here on my hands doing nothing; nosiree bob! I've started on the F-14 model (pics of the ongoing build will be up soon) which is taking up a lot of my spare cycles - hence the dearth of blog posts in the last six days - and I also received my copy of Wayne Grudem's Systematic Theology today and have started reading that. I've never taken a good, hard look at basic core theology before...I've read through a book or two, such as Lee Strobel's The Case for Christ, but they have been mostly apologetics or study methodology books more than core texts on theology. It is gonna be a hoss to get through what with being over 1,100 pages in length including appendices and such. As it is a text book however, the conclusions of the pieces and parts are independent of one another such that I can treat the book as more of a smorgasbord than a cafeteria line and hit the specific doctrines in any order that I choose.

I will also have to admit that the lack of regular posting on the BrainDrain is due in large part to the insertion of the Pre into my daily life. My laptop is on standby for much longer periods of time these days and I'm doing a lot more tweeting, IMing, and emailing on the Pre. Typing out long missives for the blog via the Movable Type interface in the Pre web browser can be done, but it is rather tiring and that has caused me to go all "single serving Jack" on my approach to bloggination by using Tweed to post my free associations in pseudo-real time. That should tell you just how compelling I find my Pre to be, because I'm telling you that nine times out of ten I'd rather use my smartphone to do internet-y things than to fire up my new Dell Studio 15 in order to chat or blog. It really is well on the way to becoming my major indispensable piece of personal electronic gear.

And now that you are all caught up, I now return you to your regularly scheduled life. Enjoy, and thanks for stopping by. No, really...go on. You need to pick up some milk before your wife freaks out, and don't forget to buy Toby a new tricycle to make up for the one you ran over last night after coming home late from spending too much time with "the boys". Shame on you.

If you happen to be on unemployment here in Texas, let me offer you a little word of advice: even if you get some part-time work (consulting, mowing lawns, walking old ladies, whatever), continue to make your unemployment payment requests on schedule. Otherwise, you'll have to file a whole new claim to get things setup again and you'll end up with another two week waiting period before you can make a request for mo' money.

I failed to make three payment requests while I was doing the shorty consulting gig and was away at Galveston, so when I tried to make a request just yesterday, I found out that my benefits had been suspended and I had to call the TWC Tele-center to have things reinstated. Four billion calls later, I finally got through to find out that even if I'm doing things to have money coming in, as long as they're not full time (which means greater than 30 hours per week) I still need to request my benefits (making sure to document what work I actually did so that they can deduct what I made from the benefits accordingly). Once I get full-time employment then the claim ends. You apparently can't just request it when you need it, you have to request it on schedule or things get dicey. So, in yet another dose of state-sponsored irony, a person gets penalized for being self-sufficient and not needing to draw unemployment for a few weeks.

What a country.

The first contract is in the bag, and overall I think that it went pretty well. I was able to go from knowing nothing about the application to having it running in two days, and was then able to add the customizations and finish up the documentation in another day and a half. It was a simple project, but it required some experience that the client didn't have and it allowed me to ease myself back into the software development world in a nice, orderly fashion. You know, to be honest, this contract was kind of what I thought that my Level 3 job at IBM was supposed to be like - fixing a few bugs here and there or getting something to run properly, but also mainly customizing the application for customers to add features or make something work specifically for them. We did a little bit of that at IBM (sometimes on a very large scale for a single large customer), but for the most part it was always about getting things to just run as advertised and nothing more.

Now that the contract is done, I'm back to "livin' the dream": getting up late, going swimming when nobody else is at the pool, catching up on reading and television, and just generally enjoying the unemployed life. Ideally, I'd be either back to scouring the job boards full time or pushing my fixers at RHT to find me another contract, but since I've got the mission trip to Galveston coming up at the end of next week, I don't really want to take anything until I'm done with that. I guess that means that I'm currently "benched", to use the parlance of the industry in which I now find myself. This is a good thing, though - it will allow me to concentrate on the Life On Loan show coming up THIS FRIDAY and will also give me time to prepare for the Galveston trip and help out with that (seeing as I am the YSA Intern at GHBC, after all). I kind of hope that I can keep up this short term contract work followed by short bench breaks for a little while because I think it would really serve to keep my stress level at a manageable mark as well as keep enough money coming in for me to satisfy my financial obligations (having no debt is a nice place in which to be).

Plus, it gives me more time to practice using the Toypedo so I can display my deadly accuracy at the next pool party I attend. Gotta have priorities in life, man.

In case you haven't been paying attention to the Twitter feed recently, I rejoined the workforce in a manner of speaking this week. I started getting paid for the internship at the church and I also undertook my first contract job as well. Now that the initial day is over, I think I have a much better handle on what to expect from here on out.

The world of the contractor is such a different one than what I have previously experienced, and my first contact with it left me kind of shell-shocked. I'm used to being an employee of a company who is assigned a project with fairly long completion dates and the understanding that if the technology isn't known that there is time to learn it; what I felt on the consulting end of things is that I'm expected to be an expert already - the client has a project and needs some expertise and brings in a contractor who has the missing skillset to fill in the gaps. I'm used to a much slower pace in initial negotiations as well and I wasn't quite prepared for the fact that an interview with a client for a contract position is more for them to see how you'd fit into the culture versus a competition for the open slot - if the contracting company presents someone to a client, they're presenting them as the ideal candidate and the initial meeting is to find out if the contractor is in some way not going to meet the needs rather than the rigorous interview process to discern the best technical expert for the job with the associated wait time as they interview other applicants. I really recoiled internally about being "the java guy" or "the web services guy" to come in and do a whole project with those things because I'm not an expert in those fields - I just have some overall and general exposure to them; I know the concepts but I've never written an application myself that uses them. I don't think anyone has ever used the words "ninja" or "pimp" to describe my coding or development skills. The idea of being "the" guy for anything right out of the gate caused me to put a lot of pressure on myself (whether it was real or imagined, I don't yet know) and that aided and abetted my freak-out.

So, you can probably imagine my surprise when I went from accepting a Wednesday interview slot on a Tuesday to having the realization that there was a good possibility that I could be working full-time on a contract for the next 2-3 months on the Thursday immediately following the interview. I sort of freaked out. It's like going from 0-120 mph in like .05 seconds. I'm sure that these thoughts played a big role in how I did in the interview because, to the best of my knowledge, I won't be getting that contract (although that was also due in large part to the fact that my planned mission trip to Galveston directly collides with their release timeline for the project). My confidence was a little shaken and I'm sure it showed in my discussions with the team. They will be expanding more in the future because they have a lot of irons in the fire, so hopefully after I get back from Galveston and have no further time collisions we can try again to see if there's a match there. Now that I know what to expect, I will probably come from a much stronger position internally and, as my fixer says, I must be pretty good because they don't let just anyone into IBM or stay for 9 years if they're not.

In the meantime, another 2-3 day gig came in on Wednesday that I accepted (with a better hourly rate than the one I interviewed for), which I started today. There was no interview process for this one - I just showed up at the specified time and place, was filled in on the situation, and got to work. That was also disconcerting - accepting work without hearing what the project entails is going to take some getting used to. For instance, all I was told about this contract was that it involved "debugging some web services security issues", and that was it. I didn't really feel that I had enough information to make a decision on whether or not I thought I could do it, and so I had to go into it with the "fake it till ya make it" mentality. Once I heard about the project and what they were trying to do, and once I got into it, the old programming juices started to flow again and I was feeling better about it, but all I can say (again) is that this is just going to take some getting used to.

I think in the end, I will come out of this liking the consulting gig for a while, because it does allow for a certain amount of autonomy and the ability to take a project from start to finish (which I haven't done in a long time). Also, if a gig sucks, it's not going to last forever and if it really goes sour the slate can just be wiped clean with the next contract. Granted, if enough of them go wrong, I'm sure the agency will stop bringing them to my attention, but I surely don't intend for that to happen. 2-3 months is not the end of the world, and neither is biting off more than I can chew - worst case is that they bring in someone else to replace me if I get in over my head, and best case is that I learn something useful in the process via the crucible of a pressure performance situation.

Plus, having a little more money coming in is good too.