Back from the brink
Jimmy Buffet: "...like a man just released from indenture"
Supertramp: "...like a ship without an anchor...like a slave without a chain..."
Frank N. Furter: "I'm going home"
OK, it's not quite as extreme as the legendary Transylvanian's final trip home, but it sometimes feels that way (but with a happier ending of course). I'm back, having served my management tour of duty. What I thought would be 2 or 3 months of transtion duty turned into eight months of managing a team of 40 in a highly visible product unit within a highly visible division. Pure management work is just not fun for me. It's mostly political wrangling and process management that's far removed from delivery of anything useful. This is in stark contrast to my permanent job, where I feel like we're dealing with important and interesting technical decisions on a regular basis and I can actually add value. (Plus, I can spend a few hours a week actually writing code, which is a thousand times more interesting than anything I did as interim dev manager.)
Actually it was mostly finished up at the end of July, but it's taken me a good month to get back into the swing of my permanent job, which is being the dev lead for the MSBuild team (which is, fortunately, a team so strong that things continued to go fine in my virtual absence in the dev lead position).
Learn from my experience: if you have a job you like, don't take a job that makes work feel like work, even if it has more perceived glamor or prestige. It's not worth it!!
Now that I'm back to my normal job, I intend to recommit myself to this blog, and I'll even try to post interesting technical stuff too from time to time.
Chris
