New Job Update

So I've been on my new job for a couple weeks now. All in all, I'd say it's going well. I spend a good portion of my time putting out fires so that people with bigger hats than me can do more important stuff, but I can honestly say that this has been a truly educational experience.

Since I started this job, I have conducted interviews, contributed towards hiring decisions, had a little (more than I'd like) experience with the process of talking to an employee who is not performing and may need to be let go in the near future. I've had the chance to view the workplace environment from another perspective, and on a professional level I think that's going be a valuable thing. It's also nice that when I see inherent flaws in the way we do things, I am occasionally in a position to simply fix them, rather than complaining about it to somebody else.

I think one of the things I like most is that, apparently, I'm very very good at this job. My two bosses keep pulling me aside and telling me what a fantastic job I've been doing, and how much they appreciate all my hard work. I expect it's mostly just ego-stroking to keep morale up, but it's still nice to be praised once in a while.

The job has its drawbacks, however. I freuently feel like a glorified babysitter, running from one employee to the next to fix a computer problem or help them understand an issue. This becomes less of a problem the longer a particular person has been on the job, but with a constant influx of new employees (despite the fact that the job ends in three months, we're still trying to get ourselves fully staffed) there's an equally constant stream of questions to answer and issues to deal with. I often find that I've gone out of my way to draw up a schedule or improve the process, only to find that somewhere further up the chain the entire thing has been redone and the fruits of my labors go straight into a bin. The hours are inconsistent, and more than once I've found myself working until 11 PM one night only to be back at 9 AM the next day. But these are mundane problems that come with the territory, and they are hardly amount to anything more than an annoyance.

All in all, the job has been good to me. It's a step towards what I really want for myself, and I'm glad to have taken it.