I don't get this. Not only do I really like my job, I really like almost
everything about it. Even the commute hasn't been too bad, mostly because job +
commute = still less hours than I worked in the last
place.
Obviously, I expected to like what I'm doing, or I wouldn't
have taken the job. The strange part is that it even feels good to be back in
aerospace again. I worked hard to get out of the industry. I thought I wanted to
escape mostly because, while you do get to work on cool stuff that flies, there's
usually an ungodly amount of red tape and procedural crap to get through to do
anything.
Maybe it's because I'm actually into the procedural end of
it now and I know why all of it is there. Maybe it's because at this company,
there isn't all that much of it that doesn't need to be there. Maybe it's also
because I'm on the commercial end of it, not military and not NASA, so there's no
hierarchical rank thing going on and no NASA monitors sitting in on every code
review whether or not they know anything about it.
Maybe it's also
just a bit of a retreat to the familiar. I can say, though, that it's actually
nice to have the rules defined. This is as opposed to working for a company that
tries to think of itself as cool and likes to pretend there are no rules, so that
while the rules are there, of course, they're all undefined and you never are
quite sure when you're going to be in trouble. Here, everything is explicit and
it's even easy to figure out which rules can be broken with
impunity.
An example: the dress code here is minutely laid out and
you're only supposed to wear jeans on Fridays. Quite a few people wear them every
day anyway, but they know they'd at least better not wear holey falling-apart
jeans, at least within normal work hours. At the old place, they bragged about how
casual they were and everyone wore shorts...at least at first. Toward the end, as
they brought in more and more high-level people to try to save the sinking ship,
the people who were project managers and up, or who wanted to be, began to dress
up more and more and I even heard people discussed behind their backs for dressing
too casually.
Bleah. At work, at least, I'd rather know my
boundaries, so that if I want to go outside them, I know how far out I am.
PS. The rules say minor personal Internet usage is ok, as long as
it's not abused. I'm at lunch. In case you were wondering.