Art of Growing Old

“I need to discuss this with development”, sometimes I still wonder if this is an OK thing to do. Either way, when someone catches me on messenger to corner me on a problem that I don’t have a solution to just yet, this is usually my answer if I don’t already have a solution. Well, this is the only action item I have on my plate this morning. Let me email development and wait until next week for a response.

Hey, the new episode of the Office is out…

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I started with the basics and that was hard enough (in a very unconventional way). I begged for work so that I could start getting a feel for the true nature of the job. Let’s face it, you can only learn so much from studying up on specifications and pretending to solve problems. So I began with the small problems, started getting a feel for how to go about certain things and ran into the same frustrations that everyone does in a large company. I was 15 minutes into my first problem and I was already screaming “WHERE THE HELL IS THE DOCUMENTATION?”.

The component I was working with was massive. It seemed like my colleagues shared this dark humor in the notion of ever truly mastering the entire thing. I wanted to know everything about it. I began tearing through the specifications more heavily - now that I had gotten a feel for the true application of the knowledge I had a better idea what to be paying attention to.

Even if you are a complete geek, these specifications aren’t something you’re going to find yourself reading at a coffee shop because it’s fun. At least not more than once…I started boiling the job down to it’s simplest form so that I could find that “common denominator” between the terminologies and technologies (theirs and…well, the rest of the world’s). I wrote the following down in the first and last page of my notebook (it’s been filtered of “geek” as much as I could):

“This department maintains the Security component…as we implement solutions to defects, we make them available to our customers. In order to do so, we logically have to have access to the same code. Therefore, we have to have some form of source control to keep track of versions…and no one here has even heard of Subversion so my next job is figure out what we use.”

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Yeah, I found it alright. This is where it all started going downhill, so of course I remember finding it.

Geeks:

I’m going to break character here to describe this to you: I want you to imagine Visual Source Safe being written for and hosted via a mainframe and you can find files via one of the WORST UI’s I have ever come across.

For all of you non-geeks, the geeks that are reading this cringed and probably vomited a little bit when they read that statement.

Anyway, so I had just found out how everything works…or rather attempts to work…

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I felt frustrated but I knew that I shouldn’t be. After all, Neumont didn’t just teach some mindless approach to software development. I adopted some very important philosophies from my instructors. The “Junk Theory” began ringing in my ears as I began to settle down from my distaste with the particular solution to this problem. “Just because I haven’t heard of something, does not mean that it’s any better or worse than what I have heard of”.

I began sampling more and more of the problems of my co-workers to get a better feel for the types of problems I would actually be working with. I should try a Venn diagram of where the problems intersect. There might be one or two shared areas? Seriously, every problem was fairly unique and it was about a 50/50 chance of it being a configuration-based problem or any actual defect. It was our job to figure that out - although in a perfect world we would only see the defects…

 

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I keep interrupting my own story but yes, “in a perfect world” lots of things would happen, wouldn’t they? In a perfect world, Scrubs would be real and I would be best friends with JD. But that’s not happening, now is it?

OK, seriously, I heard this phrase for every other problem that came up. It’s NOT a perfect world, so what the hell are we going to do about it?

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Time went on, as it always does, and I was becoming active in the team. I was trying to push through the negative thoughts that were entering my mind…and the internal conflicts I was battling throughout the day. On a lighter note, I was beginning to get along with my teammates. Obviously the age different was a barrier for humor…but nevertheless, I felt I had been forming a bond with my teammates.

So there I was, in an imperfect world and trying to make the best of it. Despite the recent bond with my team, I felt like something was wrong. I was determined to put my finger on it…but in the meantime, I was beginning to question my decision. I closed my laptop and called it quits for my second week.