Last day at work

(image: copyright zaphodikus)

Some thoughts on my last day at work. It's a strange feeling to be 'unemployed' for a few days. I must say it is not the same as a bank-holiday at all. I have 2 boys to look after every bank-holiday, it's no party I tell you. Deja vu? not-really I only ever did this twice before, the first time was packing all my stuff into a 2L ford station-wagon and driving from Cape Town to Johannesburg. I battled a bit in Johannesburg, but at least I had a job to go to, and I must admit there are always things I would have changed. But one thing I would not, I was not glad to be rid of the old place at all. You always think to yourself, at last I am getting out of this wretched place, and away from all the work that I hate. Hey, for some of us, work is fun, challenging, learning or stretching and something I generally want to enjoy 50% of the time. The other 50% is pure hard work (normally mental effort for most of us).

(image: copyright zaphodikus)

When the fun things get less, or you see something where you can do more - that's when you need to move out of the comfort-zone. At heart I am a comfort-zone man. I like to tune my environment to suite me. I have learned lately that it really is more and more 'who you know, not what', and this pushes the work-focus onto working with people more often, and doing it better. Strangely most engineers are right-brain thinkers, not left-brainers getting all creative on you, as a right thinker, emotions in the workplace is not my forte'.

Leaving my Job in RSA at Adroit was hard (doubly because I was leaving the country too), and as always the last day still feels funny - it's not something I want to do again and again, so last Thursday was hard, luckily my login is supposed to lock me out after 4:30, so I had a hard deadline (well I assumed that even if my network account is still working, that it's a bad time to be working hard). So I was lucky to have some code to prototype and hack together and keep me busy on my last Symbian day. I would have been disappointed if I got pushed to do extra work-things in a hurry, I mean what motivation is there to build something of quality?
Bad things in my experience at Symbian were the total flood of people to deal with, the difficulty in getting help and documentation, and then the huge open office. Day 1 was overwhelming to be honest. I mean working at Adroit was not easy either, we did not have as much easy access to training - but we had a lot of code-ownership responsibility over time. Chance to grow was less, but the tools all worked without complaint - something I never experienced while working with the arm tool-chain script was a feeling of peace when hitting that compile->link->rom button. Sure, App-level development on Windows is no cakewalk either, but the support is so much more accessible.

(image: copyright zaphodikus)

I like to keep the work door open if possible, I have met lots of very clever people (I am told I'm also clever, but I'm actually lazy so it cancels out) at Symbian. It's quite scary when you have all the clever guys in one room, and Clear Com will be no different I imagine. Next posting is all about how great Amazon.com sometimes is.