After about 5 months, I’ve decided that it’s time to move on to another gig. I’ve learned a few things, and I’m posting them here in the hopes that the lessons might be helpful to other programmers and techies-at-large.<\/p>\n
Working in a small business as the sole do-it-all technology person has its unique challenges. It can be very fulfilling to be the sole expert and “enabler,” if that turns you on. But the flip side is that management might not really understand or care that much about their technology. Is there a reasonable budget for what they’re trying to accomplish? Do they understand, at a high level, your projects and how they contribute to the mission? Are technology projects considered a burdensome mystery or something valuable and embraced by the company? Question the reasons why there’s only one tech guy\/girl and whether that seems right.<\/p>\n
Another thing to assess is whether you can deal with taking over the existing codebase. I’ve taken over other code before with success, retaining what was good and doing clean up as necessary. At this past gig, things looked reasonably tidy at a first glance, but as time progressed, I realized a ton of abstractions weren’t in place, and those that did exist didn’t make sense. Some refactoring might have been interesting to do, but this endeavor wasn’t valued when I proposed it as a project.<\/p>\n
Lastly, I think it’s important to be wary of promises about the future. Even with the best of intentions, things change quickly at small businesses. The projects I was initially excited about got perpetually deferred for various reasons, and I found myself preoccupied with doing maintenance code fixes, making cosmetic tweaks, performing server administration, and providing support for third party software (which I really don’t like to do). The company needed these things done, so I did them with as much cheer as I could muster, hoping we’d eventually get to a place where some solid new development could occur (and I could sneak in some refactoring)—that’s what floats my boat. But it became to clear to me that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.<\/p>\n
So that’s that. It’s a shame it didn’t work out, especially since I actually liked everyone I worked with. At least it’s an amicable departure, and I hope to be involved in hiring a replacement who might be a better fit for their current needs than I am.<\/p>\n
The new gig? Java. Been catching up on it, since it’s been a few years. Oh, it feels so nice to have package namespaces, real data types, full-featured APIs, and real object-orientedness again. Like coming home.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After about 5 months, I’ve decided that it’s time to move on to another gig. I’ve learned a few things, and I’m posting them here in the hopes that the lessons might be helpful to other programmers and techies-at-large. Working in a small business as the sole do-it-all technology person has its unique challenges. It … Continue reading “Lessons Learned”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,13,9,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-java","category-php","category-software","category-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}