casual friday

My previous employer was pretty laid back about everything - needing to leave early or come in late, timelines, dress code, etc. Currently I'm working at a more rigid company and I never realized how freaking awesome casual friday is. When you actually have to wear business clothing every day (or business casual), getting to wear jeans is like a holy grail. A wonderful bonus. That doesn't cost the employer anything. And my current company doesn't do it. No casual friday.

I think it's little things like this that big/older companies don't realize. Employees run any business, they code it or sell it or represent it. And when the employees are happy, they are loyal. And when they are loyal, that job they do - it improves. Because they really mean it when they do it. And so your casual friday karma comes back to you in a better represented company (and hopefully in dollars).

And yeah, I'm happier in my normal clothes. Dressing up is the pits. I never, ever make contact with anyone that has to judge this company and decide to work with them. Why should I have to look nice every day? It does nothing but increase my dry cleaning bill and make me uncomfortable sitting like a super nerd in my little bullpen with other nerds, coding in front of a computer. And when I'm uncomfortable, I work less...because I'm busy adjusting my dress or yanking on my pants that are riding up. Man I miss casual everyday, let alone casual friday.

CASUAL FRIDAY NOW! BUSINESS CASUAL NEVER!

(is this somehow distasteful for me to re-appropriate that chant for my stupid work gripe? yeah, probs, right?)

I am getting perhaps two less hours in the house every day and, on average, one less hour of sleep every night. And I feel wrecked every day at 8pm. That will get better right?

I had my first "interview" for a placement on a job today. It was...not great. For a variety of reasons. Most of them being that at most times I had no idea what the person was actually asking. Clear and concise questions rule the world. If you ever interview people, drawn out scenarios of "what if" are just...not conducive to truly figuring out what the person knows. I'll know if I'm being staffed on the job tomorrow. I hope I am, mostly so I can get the anxiety of not knowing about consulting out of my system.

Hopefully this blog will be less job ridden in the following months. I'm going to bed.

A lot of people are inquiring about how the new job is. Yesterday I had one of the best days at work I've had in a while. Time passed, I studied, it was great. But this pattern, my studying for certifications, isn't really how life will be. They aim for 85% chargeable - meaning that 85% of my year I'll be on projects. Some people end up close to 100%. I have no idea what I will be - but I do know that not being on a project isn't typical and it isn't something I should take for granted. Nor is it easy for me to gauge/judge how the job will eventually be. So to those asking - it's great right now, but ask me again after a project or two.

As a related but tangential thought - it is often said that kids and pets need limitations. They need rules to guide them. And I think that might be true of my working happy place - I need guidelines for good/best behavior and I need to have clear expectations. I am expected to have a certain number of certifications within the first two years of employment at my new job. Knowing this, I, an over-achiever, am going to go into overdrive getting those and then hopefully leaving them in the dust. I guess I need restrictions and expectations to feel satisfied.

Also, honeymoon period?

The life of the short-term unemployed has been pretty up and down so far. Mostly just a bunch of reading by a pool and relaxing with my game obsession (Tropico 4). I am lucky enough to have a retired father in Florida who opens his house to his children selflessly. It was fantastic.

But it was also fraught at beginning and end. Beginning...we left on the day of the insane, torrential storm in Chicago. Our morning, pre-flight, was spent with towels and buckets in our basement. We were lucky enough to not have sewer back up (oh flood control, I love you completely). But we have an issue with our back door being too low and a clogging drain right outside of it. And a newly found crack in our foundation (or brick wall, as it were). End...we came home to super delayed luggage handling and loml's (I guess our?) car stalling in the cell phone lot (his parents were driving it to pick us up). We wound up taking the L home and leaving the car with his parents.

All that being said, relaxation was great and I have completely let go of my old job. The last day was weird. Saying goodbye to my project coworker who was also my work bestie was weirdly anti-climatic. I'm feeling sure I may not have the best of luck keeping in touch with him and he was a huge part of my life for the past three years. Work friendship is weird. Wiping my computer was the saddest moment (which is kind of sad in and of itself). But ultimately I left at the end of the day like any other day at work. Except I left with stuff:

That's it. That is five years of desk flair and two presents from coworkers. It's not much. I had to spread it out for effect.

I'm getting excited to get on to the next thing. Next Monday is my first day at the new job.

Tomorrow is my last day of work at a place I've been at for seven years. I would have expected to be writing a post here about how it's bittersweet and how I'm sad but also excited.

But instead, I'm here to tell you that I'm not sad. I'm surprised that I'm not sad but I'm definitely done. I think three and a half weeks of notice was too much. I think I "left" the job on Friday of last week and this week I'm just meeting with some of the people I like to say goodbye and good luck. And not a single one of those meetings has made me feel choked up in any way.

Maybe tomorrow will be different. But I think I'll most likely just leave with a spring in my step and my eye on the prize (the prize is a trip to Florida and some days at home to just de-stress before the new job).

Not sad. Not excited yet either. Just ready to be done.

I just finished reading Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg. And I saw her speak last week. In order to understand where this next bit is coming from, I'm going to go ahead and quote myself from this blog. 8/17/2005:

To be honest, I don't think I have very much ambition in life

I have never seen myself as someone who wanted a high power (or responsibility) career. And reading Lean In and hearing Sheryl talk...for the first time ever I'm wondering if that is really me or if that is societal pressure. That sounds silly but - I don't want to be a C-level executive (CEO, CIO, COO) and never have - I just want to do a solid day's work and not hate it. If I can enjoy it a little - bully for me. And if I can get paid enough to live a cushy life - bully for us. (totally off track: how is bully an adjective that means super good but also a noun for jerks who taunt others?). But do I feel that way because I was really just meant to be a cog or do I feel that way because I inherently know I'm a woman and have strong, ingrained stereotypical rules for what women should and shouldn't excel in?

Clearly Lean In was really thought provoking for me. I'm totally guilty of trying to plan my career around whether or not we're having kids - before we have even gotten near having a baby. I'm 1000% guilty of wanting to be liked - I think it's the only way I've ever gotten anything done at work. And on the flip side, I think it's one of the main reasons some of my coworkers slough off my opinions or ideas sometimes. I'm trying to be nice rather than presenting my idea forcefully.

I'm a lady and nearly every single thing she listed as ladies doing to prevent themselves from succeeding, I've done and do on a regular basis. So great, now what? I guess I just hope to be conscious of my wanting to be liked, start to attribute my success to myself, try to speak up, etc.

I didn't expect to vibe on the book as much as I have. I have seen Sheryl speak on many shows (and in person) now and her message is pretty solid (though boringly similar - book selling tours! Talking points! Boring). Do recommend.

Most of my brain lately has been spent going through to-do lists and trying to figure out what life after new job looks like. In some ways, there's things I will never be able to truly plan for - as a consultant I'll be travelling to various client offices around the Chicagoland area all the time. So my commute will vary wildly. I can't find a gym close to the office because the office will change. I can't even really plan a wardrobe since every client is going to be different.

Here's my current brain:

I need to get a new phone (I believe I should go full bore into a microsoft wonderland and get a windows phone). I need to cobra my healthcare. I need to cancel my bank accounts. I want to set up a home office (as there is always a possibility I'll be working from home sometimes). I need to return the duplicate and/or unwanted wedding presents. I need to spend some of our gift certificates on stuff we really want (trash can! couch!). I kind of want to get some new pants/skirts just in case. I want to go to Florida and lounge. I really, really, really want to transition some of the knowledge to another developer (at my current soon to be former job). Really want that. Am feeling hopeless about the possibility of that happening.

I did not accept the counteroffer. I am, therefore, leaving my current place of employment for what I hope will be greener pastures. The hardest part of it all was getting past my loyalty for my company and the project. I don't want to leave behind a mess or unfinished business and unfortunately it feels like that is inevitable.

I'm relieved to be leaving. But I'm scared to be starting something new.

I fell into a deep chasm in the last week - the chasm called "trying to decide if I should leave my job". Over the past month I have been going through the interview/job process with two companies. They are very different places of employment who essentially offer the same services. One is a small start-uppy company that is doing really well and one is a massive corporation that is doing really well. Both were looking to hire me as a non-travelling SharePoint consultant. Meaning I would go to clients in the Chicagoland area and develop on the SharePoints for them.

So now I have two job offers. I've turned the smaller company down. Their benefits weren't that great and loml and I are talking about trying to start a family at some point in the nearish future (near being relative). And I was about to accept big company's offer today - when my organization pretty shockingly decided to counteroffer. 

All this is just to say, I haven't fallen off of the plan to write a blog post twice a week. I'm still committed to keeping this up, as soon as my life is in order again. I hope that means that regular posting will resume next week.

In the meantime, I'll be deciding where I want to spend my future employment.

Coding introduction

I realize I shouldn't just splat: start in with a coding post. So here's my introduction of who I am and how and what I develop. I'm Katie. I had a quarter life crisis at 23 and decided to get a grad degree in "computers". My only knowledge of "computers" was because of this here blog. In fact, I just got distracted going back to the archives in 2005 to read about my decision to go to grad school and quit my job (I was a much better writer back then and so confused about life). Grad school showed me I love coding. I got a student job when someone took a chance on me and I've been coding ever since.

My first language was java. My second C#. After that I was working in legacy VB and old ASP. Some asp.net and C# when it was available. My student intern gig was promoted to full time. My department reorganized and I was a nobody floating in a sea of peoplesoft and .net developers. SharePoint was picked as our new CMS and 10 sites were slotted to beta in 2007...no one else wanted to do it so it fell on me. And I've been a SharePoint developer ever since. I think you could say my sharp languages are currently javascript, C#, XSL and HTML at this point. And the SharePoint crap. Aside: i've dabbled in ruby on rails and python for funsies.

We use SharePoint at my organization in two main ways: front end websites and collaboration team sites. The team sites are cut and dry - no one really does much to them, development-wise. But the front end stuff is highly customized. We're in the process of reworking our front-end framework to be responsive. It is a challenge - not only is it hard to design a responsive site, but it's even harder to force SharePoint to respond in the way it should. Speed has to be fast (so that mobile devices with a bad connection have a great experience). We need the SharePoint editing tools themselves to still work, but at the same time to be creating HTML5. We need so much to be different than what SharePoint provides. Aside number two, I have a coworker who does all of the design work while I work with all the code doing fun stuff like minimizing HTTP requests and tricking SharePoint into not formatting pages by using tables. He writes CSS but no javascript, so that front-end dynamism is my bag too.

So what I'm going to be putting on this blog is weird stuff I've found in SharePoint as I've gone along. Stuff we've coded that I haven't been able to blatantly rip off of the internet (most development issues/questions are answered by google and Stack Overflow). And I'm going to try to start building a git profile for myself. We do interesting things and we should share them with the world.

If you don't know what any of this stuff I'm saying means, but you want to, let me point you to a few places. If you don't know what it means and don't want to, well, why are you still reading?

Responsive design, to me, is synonymous with Ethan Marcotte. Go to his site or read his book. I own it if you want to borrow it.

SharePoint is...a beast of a CMS. Oh, I guess I should say, a CMS is a content management system. I spend a lot of time on msdn most days, so I might as well link there.

GitHub is a collaborative code sharing community. I've used a lot of git stuff in my life. Probably the first code sample I'll share with you is inspired by a PHP git.

HTML5 and CSS3 are really what makes this responsive stuff possible. New standards that we developers live by. Not sure where to link for those except, you should just go read all of the A Book Apart books. Have them all, will loan.

Stack Overflow is a development help site/forum/thingy. Can be troll-y but usually is super helpful. Example question.