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Face-to-face with the boss

2021-06-16

I seem to be talking a lot about the job here, but I guess that is the most exciting thing that's going on with my life at the moment, so that's what you're going to get.

Anyway, today I had my first face-to-face meeting with my manager. We've met before, but in this context the face-to-face meeting refers to a special meeting, a sort of an evaluation of how the work has been going and what I could improve on.

I was a bit nervous about it even though I wasn't really expecting to be scolded on anything. I've managed to fit in pretty quickly and our team of interns has been able to very quickly get into our project and have exceeded all the progress expectations. I think my manager at one point said our project is ahead of schedule by almost a month, which I'd say is pretty good, considering two of the three team members have only been working at the company for a month.

I guess all things considered it wasn't a surprise that the boss only really had praise to offer. And honestly, it was some of the biggest praise I've received from someone. "Proud" was one of the key words my manager used to describe how he felt about how quickly I've been able to pick things up. He also stressed that he was impressed with how well I can communicate things to other members of the team and work efficiently in a team. I guess it helps a fair bit that I have a few more years of university studies and student projects under my belt than many of my peers.

I think the only real criticism my manager levied was about marking hours, but even that was just general feedback. And yeah, I kinda suck at updating all my hours in Jira, so definitely could improve there. I'd rather do without the bureaucracy, but my the bosses of my boss need those numbers, so what can you do.

He also took some time at the end of the meeting to hold a lecture about the differences between the school life and the work life. He pointed out that the school aims to make perfectly mediocre individuals, prioritizing good grades in all courses and subjects. If specialization comes at the expense of other grades then it's frowned upon and you need to allocate time to things you are worse at. He said he wasn't really happy about this, because in the work life the opposite is true: specialists are highly valuable because when you work in a team, you can always leverage the skills and knowledge of those around you. Thus a team of specialists have a bigger common knowledge pool to work with than a team of generalists that have shallow knowledge spread over a large area, particularly if those generalists all have roughly the same knowledge and skills.

His suggestion to me was that since he feels positively about my skills, I should start looking into specializing into something. Not as a task for the next week, month or even a year, but as general advice to consider. I'm definitely still a generalist, almost everything in tech I find fascinating in one way or another. In fact until now I've even considered being a generalist to be a virtue of sorts, as I can pick up just about any task or project and make some progress on it. But the lecture about shared knowledge pools made me think that perhaps I should consider finding an area of software development that I find uniquely interesting. I have no idea what that would be, but maybe I'll stumble upon it during my adventures. When we shortly discussed career prospects the title "software architect" came up when I mentioned that I don't really feel like I want to advance out of the coding world into the world of bureaucracy. So, maybe I'll be software architecture specialist in the future, who knows.

But yeah, so far this experience working at this company has been very positive. Still definitely working with JavaScript and React, so that part isn't super exciting, but the project we are working on is fun and honestly any type of coding with a good team is fun. I also get to help out the other people with Linux issues and review some code from the total newbies to JS and React, and learn about all kinds of technologies that are tangential to the project I'm working on. I'll be learning about Kubernetes over the next weeks and I've already been helping our infrastructure and ops intern with getting some of that set up. All of this experience and knowledge will be valuable down the line anyway, so I will make the best of it.

The relaxed work atmosphere helps too. Yesterday we went to play some table-tennis and on Monday we probably spent over half an hour of company time playing Mölkky outside the office. Apparently next week we'll also have a team event where we're headed to a training center for the whole day to enjoy food, swimming, sauna and other such activities. Doesn't sound like a bad way to spend a Wednesday to be honest.