feel comfortable in my new job

Ok, I think I’m comfortable in my job. I’m in charge of the team, I’m rushing to pick up the pieces for an imminent project whose creator quit last month, I’m staying late, I’m rushing around trying to solve every problem, I’m getting occasional compliments over writing or catching almost-lost tasks. I guess I know what I’m doing.

It would also be nice if I had taken some RnR time in the last month, or wasn’t setting up the pagers for the upcoming launch, or made sure that the late-night alarms would set off the theme from Daria on my cellphone- “la la LA la la, la la LA la la”. I’m sure I’m going to appreciate that in the next week or two.

Maybe I didn’t want to be so comfortable after all…

I may not be comfortable yet, but that doesn’t mean the world’s standing still. The current technical lead for our product is stepping down, and it turns out I’m the best candidate to lead our group. Good news: they trust my experience and instincts. Bad news: I’m going to need to actually do management-like tasks, figure out how to inspire folks, and make sure I’m actually encouraging people to go in the right directions.

Maybe I’ll never be comfortable in my job, but it’ll always be changing in freaky ways. Time to start quoting the “what would I do if I couldn’t fail” goal over and over…

I also think I’m going to have to learn really quick how to stay unstressed and figure out how to do all the exercising I’ve been ignoring.

I still haven’t found my feet and don’t feel like I’m productively programming yet, but luckily I know how to be social, grab people for lunch, and find out from them what my group can do to help them code faster.

One of those folks told me “Great job!” today because I was actually asking her what the problems were, and listening to her answers. Amazing what caring about your customers can do, even when those customers are other programmers working for the same company.

I knew I’d start taking work too seriously. So how do I get around it? In theory, I figured out how to handle it during the time off: meditate, extra sleep, just decide I shouldn’t take it so seriously, exercise. It’ll be interesting to see if I can actually take advantage of any of those lessons I supposedly learned…

Yep, work’s got me stressed. I’m not making progress on what I’d promised to deliver, and I’m still feeling new and clueless. I don’t know if it’s the stress or just that I’m not getting enough sleep with the early rising for the bus, but I know I was just feeling absolutely wiped out by the middle of this week.

There as a part of me thinking, “ok, maybe I’m just getting older and can’t do the hours”, but then I realized that I’d felt great last year between jobs, and I’m not sure I was sleeping any less. If there’s anything going on, it’s job related, and I know I’ve just got to figure out how to deal with it – either decide I have to be less perfect, push myself less hard, or just assume it’ll all work out.

Everyone at the new job reminds me that there’s a big learning curve, and that most people don’t feel like they’re actually being productive for at least three months. The first month wasn’t too bad for me; I knew that I was new, and so assumed I’d be near-useless. This month has been worse because I know I was competent at my last job, so I feel bad when I’m not being productive at the new job.

Today, things seemed to turn around. I actually did some productive programming work, distributed a paper describing why the first project they’d pointed me at was a bad idea, got some nice compliments on the paper, and chatted with folks about the project I want to propose.

Late afternoon, I get a nice little note suggesting that the last programming change I submitted broke the build, and asked if I could back that change out. Now.

Oops. So much for feeling confident…

I cant wait for the morning when I wake up and my stomach doesnt churn….I know that this feeling will pass but i wish it would hurry up