A rough time of year at work

It used to be there was one rough time of year at work where I had to do my performance write-up*. Then I would just have to update my resume to submit it with that for promotion consideration, and that wasn't too bad. Now the pain is twice a year.

First, I have to do my performance write-up in August. That is painful for me. I can boast and brag with friends to a degree, but I don't like to do it too much. When it comes to professionally, I have a REALLY hard time selling my own accomplishments. I think it is mostly because I don't see my accomplishments as major things. It is just a bunch of PHP code to improve some web applications and add features. Other people see programming as some black art, I see it as just another task.

So, if going through that once a year isn't bad enough, I have to do another performance write up soon that is the one that goes to management to try to convince them to promote me. It is a crappy exercise and made even crappier and more stressful by a freeze on annual pay increases and my next scheduled pay increase not happening till 2013.

Oh well, enough of a rant for today.

* When I say I have to do it - basically, the way it works with most managers is they give you your objectives, but you have to write what you did for those objectives and hand that to them so they can give you a score and pass it up the chain. Some bosses help you more than others, some won't lift a finger and expect you to do all of your self-selling.

Latest goings on

Figured I would shoot in a little update here since it has been a few weeks. I did in fact build my new computer and have been playing Battlefield 3. The graphics are amazing, online play is awesome, but the campaign kind of sucks. Lots of "Click the left mouse button here, tap space bar now, press e" in spots that could have been REALLY awesome otherwise. The story was great though.

Other goings on...I bought a truck. A VERY used truck. 2002 F150 XLT 4x4 with 239,000 miles. Why? We live a long way from work, a possibly bad winter is coming, and there are projects around the house I have been putting off because we didn't have a truck to haul things like mulch and gravel in large quantities. We might actually pick up some gravel this weekend to fill in under the truck. It is passed MD inspection and we just need to wait for the dealership in DE to finish processing the title to register it here (and pay the 6% tax to do so). I will try to take some pictures and add the them to the garage page this weekend. I will be working on posting the description of it shortly.

And then there is work, which has me over-extended on duties and understaffed (only me) on my primary project. The other project I manage has tons of people working it (3 interns now and 1 future full timer), and I can't redirect them to my primary project because they only came to the office to work on that other project. I still have been roped into doing some of the coding on that lately though in order to save the system from itself. (it was growing quickly and thus some very inefficient queries were dragging the server down) I am also left as the lead for a working group and doing the prep work for a related briefing in January (that I thankfully got a volunteer to help with).

So that is what is going on, and on top of that, I am considering going back into web work on the side. So, what's up with you (my 1 or 2 occasional readers)?