I’ve been working for my current employer for a bit over a year now. (as an official employee, not counting the starting ‘contract worker’ part) When I started I didn’t know which files had the basic classes for database transactions or report generation or screen output or any of the other wonderful things we do. Now I can have intelligent conversations that wouldn’t really make much sense to anyone outside the company. (things like: “well, getItem is defined in the baseArray class. You can use it here because WindowData extends database which extends textdata which extends baseArray. But be careful you’ve already preformed a read operation in the WindowData object lest you get null data back from baseArray; auto-initialization isn’t something written in.”
Yeah, anyway. These days I’m in charge of a project for one of our larger customers. We are developing a system for pre-processing that will help place new clients of theirs into the right categories so everyone will be able to give/recieve the proper attention. (and so clients will not need to get re-classified later; an expensive process in terms of time, paperwork, and money). This has been an ongoing project for a while now and we’re quickly closing on the ‘get it implemented now’ time… if only we could get them to decide what they really need/want. Pretty soon we’ll just do the development to meet deadlines and they’ll have to live with the result… and we’ll have to modify it to fit their work… and back..and forth. Or they can decide what they want and all will be happy and good on the due date. I can hope.
That project is of course happening on top of my regular workload. Every client needs attention and I’m not going to focus on just one.
Now, to make this even better, one of the two year+ veterans of the company has resigned. Wait, that doesn’t get the right message across. Let me restate: Last week, on Friday at lunch time, one of our group notified our secretary he was leaving, not coming back that day, and would be at his new job on Monday in another state. There was no other notice. He didn’t even tell his immediate supervisor (who was out that day) about it. Naturally his projects are now being taken over by other people in the company… but no one really knows the details of his projects. He was always very possessive about his work and would not allow anyone else near his code. (ask him a question about his code and you might get yelled at… don’t even think about proposing a code change) Needless to say this is causing a degree of stress for everyone else. Right now I’m reading up on one of his projects so I can move in as its maintainer; it’s keeping me busy.
Of course, when one thing changes others change right along side… the secretary (who really deserves a better title than that, but I am not being creative at the moment) has announced their intent to leave the company. Fortunately, unlike the two-minute warning wonder… her intent is to leave in …. May. As in seven months from now. She knows how much work she does and doesn’t want to leave the next person to have no training. (coincidently, that’s how she started off: her quite knowledgeable predecessor wasn’t around to train her for the job)
A lot has changed in a year: I now work on my own for the most part, I have my own projects, one co-worker has left without notice, and another is on the way out. Thank goodness I’m part gemini.
You sound busy. It is good to hear that they are trusting you with projects. Does it mean extra time at work? I am glad to hear that you are doing well there…..
It makes it hard on everyone when someone quits without notice or with short notice… i guess you are having to pick up the pieces there…. (I never heard of a secretary giving 7 months notice. 🙂 She must know that whoever replaces her needs alot of training and care about the good of the company.)
Wow. That’s quite a story you’re in right now – that’s a defining moment in the institutional memory – you’re now one of the guys “who was there when Mr. Whatsit left”.
Now you just need to have someone to train, to be the primary trainer for the new guy – that’s the next milestone.
It does sound like you’re well ensconced in the company. And it sounds like you enjoy it. Those two things together are a wonderfull and rare thing. Congratulations!