500 Words — Day Forty-Eight: Mondays
Well the honeymoon period with my new job is over and today was kind of a hard day. I wasn’t feeling super well by the end of it and I don’t really have a roadmap or a plan to success. I’m not sure if I know what success really means at this point. The new job is definitely a challenge, but I guess that was something I was asking for. I didn’t really put a lot of effort into really developing a strong plan for this week and kind of felt like I was coasting for most of the day. That’s definitely something I want to try and improve tomorrow. Develop a plan and have stronger agency to attack that plan.
Without a plan, it is easy to feel overwhelmed and helpless. Obviously, the problem or workspace is too large, so I need to figure out a way to take the larger problem and break it down into something that I can start to digest and start building from. The first few steps are always the hardest and this job is proving no different. Monday didn’t really go the way I wanted it to, but there’s no reason that a change can’t be made for Tuesday.
One of the issues is that the scope of the overall project is so much larger and there are several interconnected complexities that make figuring out what the scope of the team that I am working with actually should be and what the overall goal of the team should be versus the overall goal of the entire project. That ambiguity of purpose makes it difficult to identify boundaries and without boundaries it is hard not to be overwhelmed with the larger overall problem. Figuring out a niche when the niche is identified is pretty easy. Figuring out a niche when the niche is a needle in a haystack is a little bit harder. But that’s how Monday kind of feels. A nice kick in the face with the reality of the situation. But the optimistic version of me doesn’t see a reason why this current state won’t be transitory and why interfaces and boundaries can’t be better defined and communicated. If anything, my goal is to make this specific problem less daunting and easier for those that follow. That saves spin up time and improves organization scalability.
Things are a little messy at the moment. The organization is definitely focused on scaling the engineering workforce without have the infrastructure in place to facilitate easy onboarding and quickly transitioning new developers into useful developers. And ultimately I think that is the goal of any new developer really wanting to make an impact. What can I do to be useful? What can I do to solve the problems that an organization is experiencing? While I have been taking in a lot of information and trying to learn as much as I can, now the time has come to narrow focus, make a solid plan and commit to action to make forward progress.
