Thursday, April 19, 2007

How to know if your job is making you unhappy

Just a quick blurb, I saw this article and it mentioned how to "Know when it's not about your job". I thought the list they gave, which briefly states the definition of a good job, was quite interesting. Here are my initial thoughts on each point:
  1. Your job stretches you without defeating you.
    • What if your job doesn't stretch you at all? All of the decisions being made are driven to such an esoteric end so deeply that even the customer for which these decisions are made doesn't even care.
  2. Provides clear goals
    • What if when you ask for detailed requirement or undetailed requirements or informal requirements or an e-mail asking what the customer wants and you are ignored time and time again? What if every time you finish what you think is expected they take things in a whole different direction which requires a rewrite? Maybe this is agile development.
  3. Provides unambiguous feedback
    • Maybe not unambiguous, but what about entirely contradictory feedback. One day you are being praised for your work because it far exceeds what the customer wanted (probably because I didn't know what the customer wanted) and you are asked to present progress to the customer, the next day the entire effort is stopped with zero explanation. That's bunk.
  4. Provides a sense of control.
    • Pretty much entirely laughable at this point, being tossed around from project to project with no hope at all of attaining any career goals leaves one with little sense of control.
So all in all things are going well. HA HA

Sunday, April 15, 2007

Best Saturday ever

Yesterday the Capitol Hill Bikes shop in DC had a demo day. I got to try a few decent bikes. I tried the Cannondale CAAD9 Optimo 3, the Cannondale Synapse 1, and the Bianchi Via Nirone 7. It was pretty decent to try the bikes, but the responses they were looking for when we discussed the bikes were basically not what I know about bikes. I thought that was weird. Basically I don't know what I'm doing on a bike to know how it flows and grips the road and what a hard ride is. So I think I'm going to start riding as much as I can. I'll see if I can ride even if I don't have 4 hours to set aside. Each of the next 10 days looks like they will be warmer than the last so I'm cool with that. I think I can get quite a few rides in there.

On that note, I got my GPS back.

A few weeks back I signed up for meetup.com. Its a site where you basically just meet up with people wo do things that you like to do. I've joined 2 groups. One for biking in Gaithersburg, they do rides all over Gaithersburg, Monroe County and DC. I also joined another group for playing ultimate Frisbee. I found that they were playing yesterday so I met up with them (go figure). It was awesome. We played on the mall while people were walking around (and through the field). People would stop by and watch us play and take pictures. For one of the first times since I moved down here I felt like I was local. It was pretty cool. I'm definitely going to play with these guys again.

Later that night Joel had a cookout/housewarming/Tina'sBirthdayParty. It was awesome. It had been awhile since I had seen many of those cats. I ended up making plans with people to play Ultimate, and do like 2o happy hours. So that'll be awesome. We carried on a running joke about my 3rd nipple and my pig liver. I was also able to vandalize the cupcakes that someone brought in by rearranging them to spell "Joel Sucks". I laughed.

So it was a good day.