the privilege of enjoying a job.

I am having a ton of fun at the "new" job (if that still applies after ten weeks or so). Having a boss hire me to do what I'm best at is just magical. And unlike the last job, I haven't had to convince anyone that we actually should all be communicating and cooperating; I get to skip the much more fun step of interpersonal work. Busy people, and engineers, are rightfully leery of meetings.

I don't enjoy wasteful meetings any more than the next person. For this project, I make small meetings and mark everyone optional; sometimes there's a planned agenda, sometimes not, but right now there's such a communication debt that it almost doesn't matter who shows up, because there will be something that will benefit. And, of course, if it's not useful, we should all ditch it and go for a walk, or refill our coffee.

Since I joined, the Giant Company-Wide Project has gone from "stalled for several months" to "making headway and shipping in the foreseeable future," which I am more than happy to take credit for. An even broader scope beckons, involving more teams and projects and features, and expanding further into the future. My local scope—my team and surrounding environs—so far looks like nobody is trying to do anything demonstrably insane, so I can look up and find the people who would like to do something demonstrably insane, and probably would, if I didn't work there.

I live with a certain amount of anxiety about having to get a "real" job someday, by which I get I mean physical; I'm not sure how well my current skillset of keeping people organized and talking would transfer outside the realm of modern knowledge work.

I'm still working remote, of course, as I have since 2014, and has turned out to be a gift for all of us here, since it's nice to see each other so much, I'm around to pick up some kid-related stuff, and then it turns out I have always loathed offices, finding them acutely anxiety-provoking, and every inch toward open-plan setups has been one more inch of deadened productivity.