Into the Wild Blue Yonder

I'm slated and elated to be starting a new job momentarily. I won't publicly badmouth my old place too much. It's a huge company and one of the region's major employers. You never know when the fates may cajole or coerce one back into the fold. Plus, almost everyone working there is, in fact, a good and competent person trying to do the most right thing, even if sometimes you can't always tell from a customer's perspective.

The company, at least the part of it I worked for, slowly became a very different place than it was when I first took the job seven-ish years ago. (Do you remember how much I used to love my job? I'd nearly forgotten.) I blame the business domain-driven model for generating stifling bureaucracies and prioritizing managing workflows over the timeliness and quality of production, but what do I know? It's an irreconcilable difference, any way I slice it. As a tech lead, the net result for me was my days became almost entirely devoted to endless planning meetings, working through bureaucracy and digital paperwork, and overseeing an extremely tedious code repo and release management flow for a proprietary tech stack nobody on God's green Earth cares about (not even inside the company). It was career suicide for me not to get out and soul-crushing to stay.

The new job will not be perfect. No job is; not even working for yourself doing a thing you enjoy. And I would know because I was a freelance consultant for years. It might even be awful. You never know until you know. However, this gig should provide opportunity to refresh and update my marketable skills in a way the old place just wasn't going to allow for, no matter how hard I tried to make that happen. And I already know quite a few people at the new place because we worked together back when my old job was fast, fun, and got things done. And it's almost entirely remote; contrast that with my previous company's RTO mandate that nearly everyone but me seems to hate. I don't love it, but even if I don't mind so much, it's a grind to be surrounded by people unhappy to be forced back into their little cubbies. It fails the vibe check.

This new job also comes with free and discounted airfare and hotel lodging. I haven't traveled much. (In fact, in a few days, I'll be taking only the third flight of my life.) That may be about to change. I'll take pictures.