If I’m being honest with myself
If I’m being honest with myself I’m really, really pissed at EVP for ruining what was a really great gig.
I was so happy when I started working at BlackOps. Going back and reading my Live Journal entries from right when I got hired, I thought I’d captured a unicorn That mythical workplace where I liked the work, all of my coworkers were cool intelligent people (proper villains!), none of the mangers were jerks, I got paid good money, and the commute didn’t suck. You really can’t ask for much more than that these days. I actually looked forward to not only going to work, but working at BlackOps for many, many years to come.
But then we got a new CEO, and with him an entirely new upper management team. And when things really started to hit the fan last summer, I dove into my work and tried to ignore the fact that I no longer loved my job, I missed the people who had already left, and I was working way harder than I wanted to be.
I kept telling myself, “Once I finish this conversion process to Flare and get settled with the new translation vendor, I’ll have created enough efficiencies that this workload will be tolerable.”
It was a nice story I was telling myself, but I was totally kidding myself. There is no way that I could have accomplished what I wanted to do with that doc set, given the crazy release schedule we maintained. When you’ve got two to three releases a month, that really doesn’t leave a whole lot of time for anything other than constantly writing Release Notes.
Which is one reason why, after almost three years there, I still didn’t really know how to use our products. I’d never had the luxury of time to learn. And if I didn’t know how to use our products, realistically there was no way that I could effectively write about them.
If we’d gotten the two recs that Andi told me I had coming in the fall of 2014 things could have been different. I would have had time to breathe. And learn. And do the sort of writing I wanted to do, the sort of writing that our customers needed me to do.
But that was never going to happen while EVP was in charge of whether or not we hired another TW. *sighs* And that’s what I’m pissed about.
I was so happy when I started working at BlackOps. Going back and reading my Live Journal entries from right when I got hired, I thought I’d captured a unicorn That mythical workplace where I liked the work, all of my coworkers were cool intelligent people (proper villains!), none of the mangers were jerks, I got paid good money, and the commute didn’t suck. You really can’t ask for much more than that these days. I actually looked forward to not only going to work, but working at BlackOps for many, many years to come.
But then we got a new CEO, and with him an entirely new upper management team. And when things really started to hit the fan last summer, I dove into my work and tried to ignore the fact that I no longer loved my job, I missed the people who had already left, and I was working way harder than I wanted to be.
I kept telling myself, “Once I finish this conversion process to Flare and get settled with the new translation vendor, I’ll have created enough efficiencies that this workload will be tolerable.”
It was a nice story I was telling myself, but I was totally kidding myself. There is no way that I could have accomplished what I wanted to do with that doc set, given the crazy release schedule we maintained. When you’ve got two to three releases a month, that really doesn’t leave a whole lot of time for anything other than constantly writing Release Notes.
Which is one reason why, after almost three years there, I still didn’t really know how to use our products. I’d never had the luxury of time to learn. And if I didn’t know how to use our products, realistically there was no way that I could effectively write about them.
If we’d gotten the two recs that Andi told me I had coming in the fall of 2014 things could have been different. I would have had time to breathe. And learn. And do the sort of writing I wanted to do, the sort of writing that our customers needed me to do.
But that was never going to happen while EVP was in charge of whether or not we hired another TW. *sighs* And that’s what I’m pissed about.