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Working Enjoyment

Fri, 03/02/2007 - 12:51pm — Nick

One good thing about having clean lines of responsibility between different developers in a small company like early on in my previous job is that you're entirely responsible for your own code, so there's nobody else that will come in and make changes without you knowing it. When I was first hired on as a developer/IT support staff at my previous company, green with a Computer Science diploma in the spring of 2001, it was only my boss and I that handled the IT and computer needs of a 50-person company. As the company grew to around 150 people towards the end of my employment there the IT staff responsibilities grew exponentially, and we eventually started hiring more people to help pad out our needs. By the end of my employment there, the IT department had added on two people, one who could do some programming in Access Basic, but primarily did reports and tech support for the users, and another who was going to be largely what my old role was (Administration and Developer).

At this point, it was very apparent that a proper versioning and issue tracking system is needed, but I could not get enough time to actually research what we should use It also didn't help that there seemed to be an atmosphere against "wasting time", which mean that just browsing the web and "playing around" was frowned upon by the higher ups. That and the fact that they liked to know everything you're doing seemed to devolve the office culture to one of "looking busy". This made research as to how to improve how IT handles things very difficult, and I got much of that done after hours at first. Also, as the complexity of the systems increased exponentially, it became apparent that people needed to specialize (Separate developers, tech support, and administrators), but there seemed to be resistance from the higher ups against doing this. They preferred everybody to be an "everyman" IT in the small department.

Eventually, getting home at 8 to 10 PM, eating a late dinner, then getting up at 6 AM to make the 45 minute drive to work got old. In the end, I searched around a bit and got a job as primarily a PHP developer at a much smaller consulting company (only 7 employees) with a proper system administrator in December 2006. This time, I was to work on a project with at least two other developers. My experience with administrating and support Windows and Linux server also put me in an interesting position; I am able to bridge the gap between the developers and the administrator. I was able to provide tech support and administrate systems internally for the developers while also doing development work, freeing up the primary administrator to take care of the company's customers.

What can I say, I'm much happier with the new job. The atmosphere is much more relaxed, and I can actually talk and bounce ideas freely with the primary administrator. I took a significant pay cut to make this move, but my hours are flexible, the drive is shorter, and I'm not stressed out by the end of the day. It's quite an amazing feeling to want to get up and go to work in the morning. As it is, this might be a company that I'll stick with for some time.

Afternote: Funny how this blogging stuff works. I initially wanted to talk about Subversion, but I ended up with this. I'll talk about Subversion in a later entry.