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

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.

My GWT Adventures thus far

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I started playing around with GWT. I'm working on 2 different projects with it right now and its pretty exciting. I ran into my largest issue last night when I attempted to pass state objects to the clients. I came to a crossroad where I could have polling or persistent connections so the server could push updates. I learned about Comet and integrating this into my GWT app. Essentially you have the server maintain connections with each client. I felt that it wouldn't be appropriate. I feel like it doesn't scale all that well.

"Yeah, like polling does!?"

Well, polling isn't great, but you can deny a polling request with little or no backlash with the way I'm implementing the game. Also, if you need to, you can just redistribute new requests to a different server. Again, this is all with my implementation and I can see obvious situations where this wouldn't be the case.

So anyway, I've got basic functionality down, I need to throw a front end on it so I can do some string testing. I do wish that I was better at LNF type stuff.

Also I signed up for Twitter. I've seen some posts on Lifehacker and some other blogs so I figured I'd give it a shot. My friend Dave actually suggested a decent extension to this using your phone with GPS for live twitter action. That would be fun, and 1984.

My Feelings on Open Source

At work I've been doing some work thats quite a bit different from what I'm used to. Essentially I'm using an Access DB. I'm not exactly cool with this. Putting the front end on it introduced me to VBA so there is that. What bothers me about it is how restricting the supplied environment is on the development process. If you run into an error due to a null reference or similar, I find that I can't look at the DB to see where in my queries I went wrong. Very strange. My theory on what is actually happening is that MS developed a GUI for a Database system, then built the DB system and entirely integrated the UI into the DBMS entirely violating MVC.

This may not be true, I think the whole OLE 'framework' introduces massive (for my tastes) coupling to the system. Which explains why no effort was put into a CLI for Windows. I think its very strange and coming from development on a Linux system, doing ANYTHING the OLE way is not very comfortable.

So at work we started talking about using different plugins or 3rd party workarounds to get things the way you want them in windows. The problem is that these solutions aren't supported by anyone other than some script kiddies which yeilds 0 standardization efforts bringing us back to 0 support.

So then we started talking about some open source projects we use and I started thinking how the whole reason we use Open Source products is because of the ease of customization and the way these things in general seem to be supported. Once an add-on has enough support, it becomes integrated into the original baseline. I suspect tabs in Mozilla's browser were like this and I suspect that mouse gestures will be added as well someday.

So with that I noted that there are so many open source products that I use right out of the box and they are exactly how I want them. Its the adaptive nature of OSS and how it changes with the users needs. Still it must be noted that for me the whole reason I got into OSS was because of customization an such, but now as I said, everything is right out of the box.

I thought it was interesting. Especially the part about working with MS Dev tools and feeling like I stepped back in time to Windows 3.1. Its so crazy.