Psychotomy

So, it’s been ~15 months since I left my old comfortable job. I’m on my third employer since then (i LOVE contracting, it’s so stable!), fourth health insurance (wtf) … and i’m not sure about the whole thing.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think staying would have been a good plan. I wasn’t going anywhere in that job, and no one had any interest in my advancing. I was a useful commodity, but if I got more prominence or more money, the company wouldn’t've been able to get as much markup on me. And the pay change was certainly nice.

But my new job? I’m not really getting anywhere there, either. First off, the job & title I was hired to? the job belongs to someone else (which I knew) and that doens’t appear to be changing (which it was supposed to change). So I’ve been doing oddball “other tasks as assigned” jobs. I have one project that i’ve been working on for over a year b/c it takes an average of 3 months to get a response to any question. time from initial question to as-meaningful-as-it-gets response, that is.

then i started getting in with security to do scans and shit. except most of their operation appears to be FISMA-esque, in that they do a lot of paperwork and boilerplating and very little actual scanning. To Wit: I did a scan in november. I did the report in two days. It’s been waiting a month now for the “team lead” to approve it before I can give it to the people to fix whatever is on it. he “hasn’t gotten a chance to look at it yet”, he says, as he left for two weeks. I’m not allowed to change the process or scan style or anything b/c it’s not how it’s done and we’d need a crapload of authorizations. I need half a dozen signatures on a justification for a piece of FREE software. And I’m not allowed to mess around and try it out first, b/c I need the approve before i can do anything with it. WHEEEE

when we changed ownership, there were basically three branches. design, code, and db. i was (am?) db and did probably 30-50% of code under code lead. after the transfer, I don’t know if we have design anymore, db kinda got dropped (since i didn’t have any dbs i suppose it makes sense) and we got a new code lead. i like him, generally, but in terms of level I’ve been dropped down to “general monkey” . I spend almost more of my time covering for someone else on the team (who has needed to be out/home/whatever half a dozen times int he last month? i have a baby boy and i’m not home that much lady!) than i do on any coding.

I’m not real sure I like my new job, after 15months. Hopefully it’ll change up some, get better. Otherwise, I may be looking again, a year from now. Because whilst we need income, I need to be having fun at my job or I’m going to go nuts. And not in a good way :/

Posted in: work by attriel /