I start my new job tomorrow and I'm excited. Will this job be "the one"? Will I continue to enjoy it even when the corporate entity gets in the way of doing good work, as it did every other time? Will I be able to get back my programming legs after two years of QA work? (I already know the answer is 'yes' here, I just always fear that I'll fall flat on my face even though I'm a proven hard worker and quick learner.)

These and many other questions are running through my brain right now, but I know that tomorrow, when I eventually arrive and get thrown in to the thick of it, I'll be able to do what I need to do and everything will turn out for the better. I've taken five days to get back into Java programming and worked through a reintroduction to Servlets, JSPs and Struts and now I'm ready to get back into this programming thing.

My last job as a web developer was so bad and ended so horribly that I really thought I didn't want to do web programming again. Six months into the QA job and I had changed my mind. I realized that a lot of the problems I had programming had nothing to do with the medium and everything to do with the management. I've been trying to find a company that seemed to have everything together and I think I may have found it.

Going to the interview at the new place was a telling experience. I was interviewed by the web department manager and a couple of the senior level programmers. You could tell that they really liked their jobs.

I was talking to the programmers when the department manager left the room for a few minutes and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get them to say anything bad about their jobs. I asked what it's like to be on call and they said it wasn't a big deal because of their bug tracking and trouble ticket systems. They hadn't actually been called in for over a year.

I asked about how their users were and they said any really demanding users could be handled by sending them through the update and change request processes. They have processes!? I've never been at a company that had any kind of working, valid processes and these people were able to show me their processes in web applications and actual experiences. These processes were not "vague".

Surely the corporate "man" tries to keep them down. No. Actually the higher ups were letting them choose the next development framework, Struts, and trusted them to properly do their jobs.

Trust ... What? Wait a minute. You work at a Fortune 500 company and you're telling me they trust you?

I figured right then that I had to see this for myself. Lucky they thought the same thing and offered me a job. I'm starting tomorrow.

I will soon see if my perceptions are right.

PS - Bloglines never really got back to me and so I kind of wrote them off. If I had a company in San Francisco and a guy in Akron wanted a job, would I call him? Probably not, but hey, I tried.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 13th, 2005 at 6:36 pm by Joe and is filed under General, Technical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.