Giving notice
The reasons you'd give for staying in a job can be real without being the reason you're still there.
I gave notice last week. Sometime in the next two weeks somebody will put a video call in everyone’s calendar with my name in the title. I’ll find out what one of these is like from the other side.
I’ve been to enough of them to know how it goes. Everything is a video call now, so there’s no cake and nobody to stand near. Somebody’s audio always drops right as the toast starts. The one that got to me was earlier this year, for the senior front end developer, who was the closest thing I had to a mentor here.
The one before that didn’t get a call at all. Last year’s layoffs took somebody I’d worked with nearly every day. A layoff doesn’t come with a party. One week they were on every call I was on and the next week they weren’t.
In January I’d have told you I wasn’t going anywhere, and I’d have meant it. So I’ve spent a fair amount of this month working out how I got from there to here.
Nobody decided
Over the last year or so the agency has sent more and more of its development to outside teams. For an agency that makes sense. Work comes in faster than you can hire for it, and hiring takes months.
Somebody who knows the client’s codebase has to review what comes back. For a lot of our front end work, that’s me. The client’s requests also have to reach the outside team in a form they can build from. Whoever knows the site best ends up writing those, which is usually me as well.
Each of those steps was the obvious next one, taken by a reasonable person, often me. But add them up and most of my week goes to reading pull requests and rewriting client emails into tickets. I used to spend most of it building things.
Nobody decided that. There was never a meeting where somebody proposed turning the front end developer into a reviewer and a go-between. I’d have had opinions in that meeting. It happened one ticket at a time. By the time I noticed, it was the job.
I’d reach for the boiling frog here, except that biologists say a real frog in slowly warming water jumps out. The frog is doing better than I am.
The review itself isn’t the problem, and neither are the people whose code I’m reviewing. They’re working in codebases they didn’t write, for clients they’ve never talked to, on deadlines somebody else set. Most of what I send back is context they had no way of having. I’d write the same pull requests in their position. But reviewing and relaying is a different job from building. It isn’t the one I applied for.
The person I’d have asked
I didn’t understand how much of my learning ran through one person until that person left.
Most of what I know about working in a stylesheet somebody else started, I picked up from their review comments. They were who I asked when a client’s theme did something I couldn’t explain. Usually they could tell me which long-gone developer’s habit I was looking at.
The questions I’d have taken to them don’t have anywhere to go now. I still ask them, mostly to myself. The answers aren’t as good.
Choosing it or sitting in it
The reasons I’d have given in January for staying were real ones. I like the variety. I’ve had my hands in nine different businesses this year and learned something about every one of them, which I don’t think I’d get on a product team. I like the people, the ones still here and the ones who aren’t.
The trouble is that “these reasons are real” and “these reasons are why I’m here” are two different claims. Inertia is extremely good at presenting itself as contentment. I know where everything is, and that’s worth more than it should be.
My résumé settled it. I update it every spring whether or not I’m going anywhere. This year the honest verbs for the last 12 months were “reviewed” and “coordinated.” Those are fine verbs. They just don’t describe the job I thought I had. I’d been telling people about that job for a year after it stopped being true.
If you’re inside a job you haven’t looked away from in a while, try writing it down with this year’s verbs instead of the ones from when you were hired. Not to leave, necessarily. A job can turn into a different one without anyone deciding it should. From the inside, “I’m choosing this” and “I haven’t looked” feel identical.
One website
I’ve spent almost six years building websites for other people’s businesses. I’ve never worked anywhere that has just one of its own. I’d like to know one codebase properly and still be around in its second year to find out which of my decisions held up.
So the new job is in-house, as the developer on a company’s own online store. I’ll know one website instead of nine, which will be a strange amount of focus after this.
The review work doesn’t leave with me. It goes to whoever’s still here, on top of what they already have. I’ve spent more of this month writing handover notes for them than on anything else.
I don’t know yet whether in-house is the thing I’ve been curious about or just the nearest door that wasn’t this one. I’d like to write about it again in a year or so, once I do.