Category Archives: Career Building

Where’d My Badge Go?

18 Monday Sep 2017

Posted by in Career Building, Completely Personal

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I had the worst sensation at my daughter’s bus stop this morning. I had my hands in my coat pockets because it was chilly and my left palm realized that my badge holder was not clipped to my front left belt loop. My palm passed this critical message on to my brain and I had a sudden sinking stomach sensation.

Then I realized I don’t have a badge anymore and I got to experience a completely different kind of sinking stomach feeling. The funding for the position that I held for eight-plus years ran out on August 31, 2017. They took back my Orca card and my badge. I carried a banker’s box of the last cruft from my desk down to my car. I had to have a friend badge me out of the garage. We said goodbye and…that was it. Very matter-of-fact, this-happens-every-day, none-of-this-is-out-of-the-ordinary.

I am now safely ensconced in a co-working space that is, mercifully, filled with quiet adults who are serious about getting work done. It is the most positive peer pressure that I’ve ever felt in my life.  There’s a big wall of windows to let in the light. I’ve learned to use the La Marzocco GS3 that’s sitting in the kitchen and I make an awesome Americano.

It all helps me stay focused and keeps the pressure on to be doing productive things (I’m currently taking a break after writing two cover letters, which I find particularly draining). I have a place to be out of the house, away from the undone dishes and the dust puppies and the bed that is calling out, “Just give up and take a nap instead…”

After a couple of weeks of reflection, I’ve come not just to realize, but to actually experience how working with people forty hours a week for eight years has an influence on you. In fact, it changes you forever. You learn from them. If you’re lucky, some of their best positive qualities will rub off on you. I’ve learned to be less intimidated by casual social interactions. I’ve learned to be more independent in my work (where independence means a willingness to just dive into the unknown head first). I’ve learned more about time management, project management, and “cat herding” from the best.

I’ve walked away from this job a better person and maybe, even though it hurts, it doesn’t hurt as much as I expected because I’m still carrying these gifts around with me and these people will, in that sense, always be a part of my life.

This makes getting a new job very intimidating. I know that if I stay too long, I will again start to pick up qualities from my close coworkers. Will they be positive qualities? Will they help me grow as a person somehow? Will I accidentally land myself a step backward in terms of maturity and cooperation? Will I feel isolated, dark, bitter, and lonely among a team in which I don’t really fit? My responsibility to assess the people whom I’ll be working with seems more critical now than it ever has before in my life. The trite “you’re interviewing them as much as they’re interviewing you” now feels much less trite and much more salient and I feel it in a way I never had before.

Overall, while I have ups and plenty of downs, I’m feeling positive about my skills in finding a good fit for me. I’m mature enough to really know who I am and what I need. Sometimes, I read job listings and get excited about who these people are and what they’re doing and how they’re doing it and if this could be THE ONE. Sometimes, I read listings and my instincts say right away “that’s not for you.”

I’m not desperate. I don’t need to act desperate. Some opportunities that I’ve been excited about have passed me by but new possibilities open up almost every day. And maybe, just maybe, you’ve landed on this page because you’re a potential employer wondering if I’m right for you. I would like to think that would happen–that someone would be curious enough to look around for my presence online (which is almost nil for complicated reasons). That kind of curiosity and thoroughness in a potential manager or coworker would certainly appeal to me. As always, I hope I’ve made a good impression.

The End of an Era

04 Sunday Jun 2017

Posted by in Career Building, Work

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On Thursday, June 1, 2017, I received the bad news that my position had been eliminated from the renewal of the SSGCID (Seattle Structural Genomics Center for Infectious Disease) government contract. The grantor of the contract, NIAID (the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) had, in anticipation of the cuts in the upcoming national budget, ordered deep budget cuts across the board, a directive they had received from their parent, the NIH (the National Institutes of Health). My position will go unfilled and that money distributed across the scientific staff so that they can be retained as FTEs and do the actual science, which is–after all–the point of the whole thing.

My position will not be filled by someone younger and/or cheaper than I am. It simply does not exist as a line item in the next SSGCID budget. The web application that I’ve labored on for the last eight years will be left without a caretaker for the final five years of its life. I’m confident in my manager’s skills and familiarity with the underlying database to be able to curate the content of the database through manual SQL manipulation. However the front end? The middle tier? She has neither the desire nor the time (she’s a real scientist and works on real, awesome science stuff for the good of the contract) to take over my web app and so it will languish.

Eight years is the longest period I’ve spent in any job. I’ve been held here by golden handcuffs. One of the greatest of these has been the no-drama friendliness and delightfully geeky intelligence of my coworkers. If I geek out about some aspect of programming, I can appreciate a lab researcher geeking out over some new process they tried in their experiment and vice-versa. SO. MANY. NEAT. PEOPLE! This was especially valuable to me because they hired me after I reentered the workforce after taking two isolating years off with my second child.

Another aspect of the golden handcuffs is the mission behind the SSGCID endeavor. Its purpose is to take genes that are potential drug targets and discover the shape they make when the protein they produce is crystallized. The crystal shapes then suggest pockets and other landing points where medicinal compounds could block the protein from acting, sending a chain reaction through the bug (SSGCID works on bacteria, fungi, and viruses) and kill it or at least render it non-harmful. My web app is a tiny cog in the works, tracking the genes we were studying (over 14k of them have been selected) and helping to push them through the pipeline. However, it is critical in helping to produce the numerical evidence needed every six months to provide to NIAID that we were still worthy of our funds.

I am sad to leave this position behind because I feel this chemistry of people and mission and corporate culture will be hard to find. However, I am also somewhat relieved. I knew I couldn’t stay for the whole thirteen years. That seemed like too long in the same spot, especially if I didn’t get a chance to dig into new technologies as they arose. A part of me is really looking forward to a new opportunity to grow my skills and to work as a programmer among other programmers.

Even though I’m still somewhere in the stages of grief and couldn’t FizzBuzz to save my life, I am starting to apply for jobs. Even though many look quite tempting, I’m finding myself feeling a twinge of terror each time I do it, because each application leaves you vulnerable to rejection. How many interviews will it take before I finally don’t choke at the whiteboard? How many interviews will it take to find a team that feels like I “click” with them and would be a good addition (I’m not exactly a stereotypical coder)? I’ve learned so much about being more at ease, more “me” when around strangers by observing some of my more socially gifted coworkers. Will it be enough?

My funding runs out at the end of August. I’m not bitter–they didn’t really want to cut me from the budget but I don’t actually do the science and without the science happening, I’m useless and I know it. I know others who are still on the contract have made sacrifices, such as cutting back their hours to save money. They will still do the same amount of work, but only be paid for a fraction of it. This makes me sad because they are good people who do good work and they deserve to be compensated appropriately.

So, let’s wish them luck on a successful next five years as well as wish me luck on finding a good new job to call home.

C++ Is More Fun Than You Think

05 Saturday Mar 2016

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A little over a month ago, I wrote about starting a C++ course as a structured way to challenge my brain. The nice part is that C# is a C-based language (the “C” is not merely coincidental), so a lot of the syntax is familiar to me. The bonus part is that it’s forcing me to learn, from the ground up, about all of the keywords and language features that I take for granted, even though they don’t map directly from one language to the other. In short, learning C++ has inspired me to dig in under the hood of C# and learn more about the language itself.

What’s it like? There are ten “modules,” one for each week. Every module has assigned readings, an hour and a half long online session with the instructor, a dedicated forum, and (in most cases) a homework assignment.

How do I work it into my busy life? With a lot of enabling from my husband. He helps me carve out time on the weekends and in the evenings to do my readings and my homework. He even set up a special, out-of-the-way place in the house for me to use while I watch the online sessions.

Homework is due Friday night. I try to start it the weekend prior and have it done by Tuesday or Wednesday so I can review Thursday night and tweak anything I don’t like before turning it in.

Online sessions are Tuesday nights, so I’m missing every other one, as it conflicts with my writing group. Never fear: the session is recorded and I watch the ones I miss on the following Wednesday.

I try to complete the readings before that lesson’s online session by plowing through them on the weekends. I even take down hand-written notes in a little notebook as I grind through the texts to help me remember key points. How quaint!

But you hate reading tech books…how do you manage all this reading? I have to say that I’ve never been able to sit down and read a tech book cover-to-cover. It just dulls my brain and nothing sticks and it makes me feel misanthropic. Why is it working now? The key seems to be that the readings are focused and limited. Not to say that it’s not a lot of pages to cover and not to say that it’s not heavy weather sometimes, but there is benefit (for me) in pacing the book, instead of trying to suck it down all at once as if it were some confection of a novel.

We’re reading Scott Meyer’s Effective C++, which has a format I really enjoy: 55 short “items” on centered on basic best practices in a gently proscriptive approach that still allows for nuance towards exceptions. This format really clicks for me.

We’re also reading the C++ Primer by Stanley Lippman, Josée Lajoie, and Barbara E. Moo. It’s a thick book (I can see why it took a team to write it). It’s very in-depth in the way I typically find very difficult to just sit and read (instead of referencing). However, with the assigned reading skipping around and dovetailing with the other reading and the other pieces of the class, I’m gradually warming to it and to the level of detail and depth of understanding that it provides. Sometimes I lament that I can’t keep ALL of it in my head, as the details are so fascinating.

So how do you really feel about this class thing? Making time for it is tough, I’ll admit it: work/life/class/obsession balance is very hard. But I’m really enjoying getting the technical understanding of the language and it’s made me want to learn more about my own language and understand it more deeply and take better advantage of its features. My wish list at Amazon is now filled with tech books that I long to read and my only lament is that the course is so in-depth that it won’t conclude until September, meaning I have to wait several months before I can really start to bury myself in all of the studying I want to do.

Overall, the class has made me more excited about programming than I’ve felt in years. I guess that’s the consequence of staying stable at a job for several years where the work can get repetitive. I needed some serious brain-food to jerk me out of the doldrums and I couldn’t be more delighted in getting this inspirational kickstart.

C++ on a Lark?

29 Friday Jan 2016

Posted by in Career Building, Side Projects

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It’s not exactly a lark but, given everything else happening in my life, it is a bit of a crazy commitment. I signed up for an eight month, three-part course through the University of Washington’s extension program, aiming to complete a certificate in C++ development. And I do have to admit that, while it’s not exactly a lark, my decision to sign up was a bit impulsive compared to my usual standard of thorough over-thinking.

Why C++? Why not C++? It’s a language that’s not only venerable and well-established, but it’s still in demand. However, my biggest motivation is that it’s a more “low-level” language than anything else I’ve dealt with before as a web developer. This means I have to get my hands dirtier than ever before because fewer things will be wrapped up with nice, pretty bows like I get with C#, MVC, and EF.

I’ll be plunged into working with new types of challenges (like keeping track of my pointers and watching for memory leaks) and wrestling with more complicated algorithms through my homework–things my college education glossed over and my work experience has not touched on often enough. This has left me at a disadvantage at the whiteboard during interviews, where I typically freeze like a deer in headlights. I’m looking forward to earning more confidence at that whiteboard in the future through this adventure.

Another advantage is that I’ll have the chance to practice more complex OO design. Having worked at the same job and working on highly similar modules for several years, I don’t have much opportunity to be challenged by new problems to solve with inventive and solid designs. I know that my current patterns have shortcomings but, with my hair often afire and being alone, sticking to convention has become more important than innovation–which is a sad place to be. While features where I could have the opportunity to do something radically different are discussed (D3 and data visualization? Elasticsearch?), these treats have all gotten delayed in my work queue multiple times.

Why a formal course? As a mostly self-taught developer who has often worked alone or in a very small team, I’m craving the opportunity to not just have a once-a-week hangout with other devs wanting to learn the same language, but also to turn in my homework and have my code reviewed! Having other minds against which to sharpen your own is an incredibly valuable opportunity, one that I don’t have at my current job (no one on my team works in my language). Plus, I’m wretched at sitting down and reading tech books from cover-to-cover. I want deadlines and the motivation of committing a large chunk of money for the experience.

Class starts February 1, with our first online meeting on the 2nd. Yes, the meetings are on Tuesdays, sadly overlapping my writing group, whom I’ll be reduced to visiting with for a stingy half hour to forty-five minutes, depending on how quickly I can zip home from the coffee shop. Hopefully a quick Circle of Shame will be enough to keep me motivated on that front. I’m feeling motivated about my class, though: I’ve done my readings, taken notes, and have been practicing small projects to get accustomed to the differences in organizing and compiling the C++ projects compared to my C# projects.

Fingers crossed that the instructor is good! I’ve looked over the lesson plans for the next ten weeks and they seem promising. The first lesson focuses on unit testing as one of the basic components of ramping up. That really earned my respect and, frankly, I was relieved to know that the instructors thought it that significant.

Now all that remains to be seen is if I can carve enough time out of my life to not just keep up, but to squeeze all I can out of the experience.

What’ve I Been Up To Lately?

11 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by in Career Building, Completely Personal, The Project, Work

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I always feel like the stretch between the time the kids start school in September to the end of the year goes by like rolling down a flight of stairs: fast and bumpy. So what’ve I been up to lately?

1: Most important, though not necessarily the biggest time-sink has been keeping the kids on track at school. Cron Family Study Hall? Actually a big success! My eldest’s progress report came home with fantastic grades, an order of magnitude better than last year. We are so proud and I’m glad I took charge and laid out a system that works.

2: Probably the biggest time-sink is this beautiful creature:Clover

I love her dearly and she’s been a great addition to the family. However, at six months old she’s still very curious (which encompasses both “destructive” and “wants to eat things that will require stomach surgery”). She takes a lot of time and energy to train and treat properly. Lots of discipline required (on my part), like never, ever getting to sleep in again because she needs to “use the facilities” and be fed at the same time every morning.

3: November gives me a special dispensation from doing just about anything beyond the bare minimum to survive. November is National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. Why? Because it’s a fun challenge! It requires self-discipline, writing at least 1,667 words of creative narrative every single day for 30 days straight. 1.6k may not sound like a lot, but when you’ve got writer’s block and a ticking clock, it gets tense pretty quickly.NaNoWriMo

This year, I’ve taken on the extra responsibility of hosting a write-in, where fellow WriMos in your neighborhood gather in a local bar or coffeeshop and your behest and write in “word sprints,” writing as hard as you can for about 25 minutes at a time. Then you break, chat, drink, and get ready for the next sprint.

Sprinting in Seattle is hilarious because we are all so “Seattle-polite.” If I ask people if they are ready to start another sprint, they all look shyly at their keyboards and murmur noncommittally. Luckily I have an abettor (a non-native) whom I can shout down the table at and ask if she is ready. She will actually answer me. But most of it is monitoring who went to the bathroom, who’s at the counter waiting for their latte, and the ebb and flow of conversation before ordering the next sprint. For all their chatting and elbow-rubbing, sprinting for three hours can get you well above the required daily word count, so it’s very rewarding to run the write-in and not only soar above the goal myself, but to get other people soaring too.

4: Reading. I binge-read so many books about teenage development and learning disabilities that I had to force myself to alternate one fiction book for each non-fiction book. On one book, I took 15 pages of notes, which I then forced my son and husband to review with me over the course of two weekends.

5: OMG, d3! I finally got the opportunity to start something new at work: data mining, data visualization, and (to make visualizations), d3. It may not be the best tool out there and the learning curve is deliciously hard (which is terrible because we need this data out fast-fast-fast to protect our revenue stream). I’ve got books in my Amazon wishlist about the underlying theory of data visualization and I’m looking forward to my self-taught course and getting enough solid theory under my belt that I can make a coherent presentation to my co-workers as well as actually build cogent and useful visualizations.

6: Beer! So I finally got to go on a date with my husband. The first in probably 6 months to a year. We went to a place called Brouwers where they have the best pommes frites and a beer list that’ll make your jaw drop. I’d been trying to take him there for the last five years, but the stars never aligned. Our waiter was an excellent beer sommelier and I drank probably the best beer of my life (I still love you, Hilliard’s Chrome Satan, but this was really, really good). I was never much of a beer (or alcohol in general) person, but this has ignited a great exploration of new-to-us beers. We usually split a can/bottle between us over dinner and it’s been a great bonding experience to sit and critique the beer, kind of like we would a movie. No, I have not seen any movies lately.

7: Sadly, I’ve been sleeping. Sleeping poorly, sleeping too long, missing out on hours of my life. It’s not every day, but it’s a lot of them. Once my husband had enough lonely evenings, he ordered me to the local Sleep Clinic, where we are in the long process of figuring out why I’m so damn tired. Fingers crossed that we find a problem and solution. I am hopeful.

Excuses, excuses, excuses. Luckily the NaNoWriMo forums introduced to me a software product that overlaps with the vision of my side-project and I was able to get feedback about what they like/don’t like about it and it’s helped to shape my vision of what I want to build. Using the software myself, I can see how it is like and yet unlike what I want to do. So at least I’ve been doing some corporate espionage and hopefully (since I did 60% of my Christmas shopping today) I’ll start laying down some simple user stories and some code to match. I’ve already got a use case for using a network data visualization, making everything come full-circle. Yay!

Wash, Rinse, Repeat, Stopwatch

23 Sunday Aug 2015

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Because of my other side projects I don’t exactly have the funds for a professional copy of Visual Studio. Therefore, I’m working in Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition. Not only had I never set up a new project in VS2015CE, selecting from its panoply of project options, I hadn’t set up any project in ages because on my current job, the project had already been set up when I got there. And while I’d shoved that project into a few different SCMs (currently residing in Atlassian’s Stash), I’ve only gotten a little practice setting up Jenkins–which is, to put it kindly, mysterious and arcane.

Hence, the “Wash, Rinse, Repeat, Stopwatch” frenzy: repeatedly setting up a project, creating an object or two, creating unit tests for those objects, setting up the repository on BitBucket, and configuring the project in Jenkins so that it builds and all of the unit tests pass. And then tear it all down. And do it all over again the next possible night (remember: work/life and life/life balance happening here). Without any notes or StackOverflow Googling.

Except for the .gitignore. No one should be expected to write a .NET .gitignore off the top of their head. There are more valuable things to fill one’s head with. Like Jenkins configuration.

I understand that Jenkins is a fairly broadly used product. It’s not exactly “industry standard” because what does that mean in software anyway, where there are so many interchangeable or nearly interchangeable offerings? But, without quibbling, Jenkins (and tools like Jenkins) are useful and de riguer to the point of being passé, ready to be usurped by the next generation of tools. Because it doesn’t end here and it never will, or else my Dad’s old Honeywell manuals from the 1970’s would be of use to me.

We all live in the here-and-now, so my short-term goal is to get a tiny spike project with unit tests running on Jenkins in as little time as possible. Once I get Jenkins down two or three times and can discard the copious Jenkins notes, I’ll start running the stopwatch on my phone and see how low I can go time-wise.

Now, am I cargo-culting? I wonder. How does repeating the same steps over and over help anything? I’m not sure. Will I be refining my spike solution as I go, slowly growing an architecture that I like? Maybe. Will I be learning how to smoothly navigate and manipulate Jenkins? Hopefully, because the Jenkins navigation is counter-intuitive to me. Bragging rights? What a weird thing to brag about. To be confronted with starting up a new project without drawing a complete blank? Yes. Especially in an interview.

So it’s not just “Wash, Rinse, Repeat, Stopwatch” today, but it’s “Wash, Rinse, Repeat, Stopwatch” for a lifetime, because things are always changing, and new tools will become standards that will become sad, outdated kitsch in time (like Dad’s Honeywell manuals). This particular “Wash, Rinse, Repeat, Stopwatch” iteration represents just one slice in time–one snapshot of what is currently standard–but the underlying ethos is a necessity for the job. Dad may have made it to 75 by staying in COBOL as it became a rare and valuable skill to large companies (banks) that couldn’t excise it, but I can’t expect the same fortune. Nor do I really want it, though I’d still like to be working at 75.

How Moo Cards Make Me Confront My Professional Identity

13 Thursday Aug 2015

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My daughter is enough of a social person that I keep considering buying her a set of Moo cards with our contact info on it so she can hand it out to the kids she meets at summer camps, school, etc. There is a school directory, but I’ve had more success hand-printing business cards (or when I want to really catch someone’s eye, a postcard) and handing that out. So sometimes I play around with the Moo site, trying to convince myself that I should just invest in a set of 50 or 100 “Let’s Play” business cards for my seven-year-old. They’re actually pretty cute.

What is less cute is that during this process, I inevitably get drawn into toying around with cards for myself. I already have corporate business cards which are nice but unnecessary in my current position and really don’t describe me beyond contact details. Then signing up for an intensive, four-day seminar in Software Product Management in mid-September (which included a group lunch and a networking reception) made my Moo ruminations much more urgent. What use was handing out something that was nothing more than my job title and corporate contact info?

Let’s not point out that I’m not brave enough to hand anything to anyone unsolicited. In my Palace of the Mind, however, I envisioned myself as sociable, gracious, and articulate at these occasions and even in the classroom.

Suddenly, I’m confronted by the front of a Moo card with several blank lines, each one with a pale grey suggestion of what you should fill that empty space with. Okay: name at the top, that’s easy; it’s a nice name: easy to parse out and spell or say. But then comes my job title. And then I have to wonder “who am I?” because my official title of “bioinformatics systems programmer” isn’t particularly accurate or informative. It’s about as compelling as my shoe size.

Well, the naked truth is that I’m a Web Applications Developer. But beyond that, filling in the lines of the Moo card to make a sort of haiku about who I want people to remember me as becomes a real challenge. I show my husband my attempts and his reactions range from “ew” to “*shrug.*” Having worked alone or as a consultant for so much of my career, my soft skill set rivals my hard skill set and hard skill buzz words move so quickly anyway that it’s the soft things that I want to be remembered for: my knack for designing systems out of vague or off-the-cuff requirements; my agility in the face of feedback; my dedication to both my bosses and my end-users.

Then there’s the dark underbelly of soft skills: my delight in dealing with my end-users (even when they’re reporting bugs or user errors); my joy in helping my coworkers; the thrill of data coming together to make a solid narrative of information; the secret passion for planning and organizing.

But these soft skills are the things I long to put on the Moo card in efficient, evocative four or five word phrases. I am not my tech buzzwords: I am so much more, but I doubt my ability to ever articulate that in a job interview.

Because the sad news is that I can’t stay where I am forever. Our current government contract has two years left, after which we may or may not be renewed–if a renewal is even offered. But even then, I don’t think I can stay forever–not thirteen years in the same place where where I have no hope of an actual promotion, where I have no hope of working with someone in the same tech stack and exchange ideas, where software is a hair-on-fire end to the means, not something to be beautifully crafted for its own sake so that it’s durable and resilient.

And so, with two years to go, I have time to invest in who I want to be: to find a path. Do I want to double down and be a coder’s coder, the kind who is isolated from stakeholders and clients and has her velocity measured and compared in sticky notes? Can I branch out and find a programmer/analyst position? A position as an analyst alone? I’m not so in love with coding that I couldn’t be happy churning out user stories and flow charts and other artifacts. Product management eventually? Project management? My current project manager is so competent, she inspires me.

The answer taunts me from just around an unseen corner. The only truth that’s staring me in the face is that I can’t move on to a job where I’m pigeonholed as a coding robot that lives in isolation and executes minute tasks that have already been described in excruciating detail. I have to be a stakeholder in my own project, contributing more than just lines of code but ideas and interact both with the project owners and the end users. Tall order, but like my husband says, “you only need one.”

And maybe that’s the perfect closer for my Moo card: Lisabeth Cron ~ Web Applications Developer ~  [contact info] ~ “You only need one…”