new job continues

We are all really enjoying that I work from home. I quickly realized something I'd never bothered to examine before, which is that I really hate offices. I love talking to people; I hate the soul-sucking fluorescent lights, the noise, the constant interruption, the ugly furniture, and pretty much everything else. Because most of Engineering works remotely, the communication friction is very low: if we spend more than a couple minutes not making progress on HipChat, we switch over to Zoom immediately and figure it out on a video call.

In an office, when you've got your head down and completely absorbed in a programming task, inevitably someone comes up and says "I hope I'm not interrupting...". I usually say, "Too late!", which not everyone has a ready sense of humor about. Working remotely achieves the Holy Grail: it is more work to interrupt you than not.

When the boy gets home from school, there are snuggles! And I can go annoy him almost whenever I want. And I get to spend more time in Redwood City, which is one of my favorite places in the Bay Area (good thing, since I own a house here now). We got a killer Vietnamese restaurant some months back. What's not to love?

(Okay, the bank owns most of the house. I get to act like it's mine, which is pretty close.)

The job itself is quirky, in that my primary skillset is distributed Unix/Linux systems--think 500 computers all trying to coordinate and talk to each other--and I am working on a Windows client program. We'll have to see how it unfolds with my desire to get back into leadership. My co-workers are super nice, though, and it's a joy to be back working at a place with a more adult attitude.

And I have a really nice chair...