The Family

I don’t remember what we have told who and doubt that nobody knows the whole, so here is the new job from my perspective. If your dad would post, he might give a different report.

He started 2 weeks ago. When he went in he only knew that he had a job, that it was with a company that Jacobs bought, which operates independently but is in the Jacobs building and, so far as insurance and 401K, is the same as working for Jacobs, and that the project would be taking down an offshore platform. Luke has always worked the “downside” of production, meaning the refining and storing end. This company works the “upside” which is finding and pumping. During the week he learned more:
1) He will not be going offshore often or for long. (that was a relief for me because of the heat and physical exertion.)
2) This company is the only division of Jacobs petroleum that is growing so it is a good place to be.
3) Probably because it is growing and the other parts of Jacobs are still laying off, many engineers have tried to make the move to this company. Very few have been accepted. VERY Few.

Luke feels like this job is a test, that if he does well he will be assigned to other jobs, and if he does not, he will be sent back to Jacobs where he will be either assigned to another project, put back on leave, or laid off. Since the latter 2 seem quite likely, he is trying especially hard to do a good job and make a good impression. Fortunately, his bosses are usually pleased with what he does.

He went offshore Wednesday the 29th and came home Saturday morning. All he did was meet with the representatives of the company that is to do the actual work and look over the platform. He said all that was physically stressful was the ladders. Because the platforms are as small as they can be, different levels are accessed by steep stairs which stick out over the water. (that would freak me out). Climbing steep stairs was hard; his thighs are sore. He intends to start taking the stairs at work instead of the elevator. The stair thing that concerns me (and i wish the man would go to a doctor!) is that one of his heels is wobbly (the heel itself moves). That makes going down steep stairs a little more difficult.

I am glad he is not going to be going offshore often or long. He did enjoy it though…. the weather was blustery with little thunderstorms forming and moving over.

And that is about all i know…..

I asked if he knew how long this job will last and he doesn’t, though he did tell me the duration will be measured in months.

They say the recession is over. I will be glad when we can tell it.

Maybe that sounds a little dramatic. Still, another developer has left the company. I haven’t talked to him directly, but I believe there are a few things around here we are not doing that he really wanted us to be doing that pushed him out the door. We don’t have strict code source control, we don’t have individual sandboxed developer spaces, we don’t use an SQL based database, and he got stuck with doing most of the document creation work. Ok, that last bit isn’t so bad, it is just a boring yet necessary part of the business.

Most of his reasons are things I’d put in the ‘nice but not necessary’ category, although some people would argue the other way with it. Some of them are things that have actually been worked on in the past, but have been put to the side for techncal or time reasons.

Anyway, I have been told that the company is going to start seeking more developers in a more agressive manner than in the past. We can handle the workload as-is, but having a few extras would certainly help things out. I am sure the next few weeks are going to be interesting as we adjust to workload changes.

Every now and then things come up at work that I’m tempted to talk about. Sometimes silly (people accidently hitting the panic button on the alarm system instead of the disarm button in the morning), sometimes serious (three people have left the job since I started), other times random musings (do we really want to take down all the trees in the back?)

This is all part of one of the Internet Great Debates that is never going to get solved. Some people say talk about everything and anything, speech is free! Others have been put in bad spots because of it. (dooce.com is an example of that; she lost her tech job by talking about it online way back)

I tend twards the ” don’t put it online ” camp. How about y’all?

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.