PFunked

So What's New

- Moving to Auburn
- Job Interview soon
- Turning 28
- Finished Phantom Hourglass
- Epic Flying Mount
- Too much Popeye's (j/k, never too much)

Popeye's

You better enjoy it for the next couple of days. Remember there's no Popeye's in Auburn. Are you sure you want to move here?

:P

[no subject]

Happy Birthday!

I am assuming if you are moving you quit your other job? Any drama there you want to share or just wanted a change?

Nah, No Drama

Not really any drama from the last job. It was a solid place to work -- fast paced environment, high profit margin, quick turnarounds, filled with ambitious young professionals. I would recommend the place to anyone.

I needed a change. I was heavily stressed when I left, for a dozen tiny reasons.

- Living several states away from my girlfriend, which probably affected me more than I realized

- I want to teach through and share my code. In a proprietary software shop, I can't GPL some neat library I wrote.

- Structure is very profitable. They set and meet ambitious deadlines. Sometimes, though, I want to sit back and indulge in code. Refactor, extra comments, design patterns, etc. In a shop like Structure I only have time for those things if I do it on my own time.

- Similarly, profit isn't really a good motivation for me. Learning, teaching, reusing, writing beautiful and interesting code, those are what motivate me.

- The lead principle of Structure once told us that if we didn't love the challenges of the power industry, we weren't in the right place. I had been in Power since my Entergy days. Mostly doing power accounting -- megawatts times dollars, in an infinite number of configurations. It sort of bored me. Structure has already solved many of the interesting bits of architecture and such, and in my position I was mostly writing new MWx$ calculations over and over.

- I was learning a great deal from one fellow at Structure. His specialties were much different than mine, and I picked up a lot of tools and tricks. He left the company before I did, took a similar job much closer to his home. I'm sure I could have learned from some of the other fellas, but we were doing nothing but MWx$ functions for months.

- I was at the office at 4AM, on a 19-hour stretch after an already long week. I found out the code I was working on would be shelved. I could not save the situation by taking some bit from the code and open sourcing it because (a) that doesn't happen in a proprietary shop, and (b) the code was uninteresting, one-off MWx$ calculations. I admit feeling a great deal of futility, and it made me wonder why I was spending my time doing what I was doing. Someone who is capitalist-minded would take comfort in that the client leveraged the code to earn a $50 million contract. I didn't feel pride in making my client a barnful of cash, as most sane young professionals would. Instead, I felt I was doing a disservice to myself by writing dull code that wouldn't even be used.

I should be fair: Structure does present a lot more problems than "MWx$". Like every software shop, you get to face XML/SOAP and system interop. You face DST nightmares and elegant solutions. You write tiny tools that help your customers automate the work of several employees. You write intuitive interfaces, you please customers, you get stuff done.

- Houston never felt like home. Everyone seemed to be in a rush to get nowhere. I'm sure things are more hip inside the loop, but everywhere else it felt like endless strip malls and cul-de-sacs and traffic jams.

---

I don't think my motivations are any better than anyone else's. I'm just trying to recognize what will give me a deep satisfaction, a job I will enjoy dragging out of bed for. This library gig has several elements I think I need:

- Near my girlfriend
- Motivation is education, higher learning
- Love of open source
- Interesting problem sets
- I felt like a foreigner in a high rise, hot shot office. But libraries have always been magical places to me.
- I like the feel of Auburn more than I did Houston.

Auburn

You'll love Auburn.... especially coming from Houston. It's just a big college party town unlike the industrial behemoth that is Houston. Best of luck.