VoxSentia

Some lovin...

Some guy here at the office got his office full of balloons for his birthday. I'm so jealous. I went to his office and exclaimed, "they must love you!" and asked if I can have a balloon.

Why did my work load quadruple when my pay didn't?

I'm still at work and it's 11PM. I've been so busy these days. I have to now get on 7:30 AM conference calls(thankfully at home). But I also am not used to my early morning schedule so I'm more tired these days. I took a nap on the bean bag here at work and I'm waiting for the Moscow developers to get in the office. The CTO went over the project plan that I have to accomplish within 90 days with our outsourced resources in India. Right now I'm only overseeing one product (a large product, but nonetheless, just one). I now have to have a good grasp of 4-5 products. Even though I don't have to know it too much in detail; I'm overwhelmed that all of a sudden, my work-load has more than quadrupled. Even though I have deferred my management duties to the new director we just hired, I still have to train him, get him up to speed and participate in all the meetings and conference calls.

Lately I've been relying on this one guy who reports to me a lot to get things done. If it gets too crazy, I'm going to quit. I'm not one of those people that live for their jobs. I believe in balance and quality of life. And I lean more towards the leisurely lifestyle so too much work isn't something I want or good at handling. But I must say, I learned a lot at this job, and still learning. I now have some management skills under my belt as well as more technical skills. Also, a lot of my management kills are remote managing which is difficult in its own way. I also got better in presentation skills; I had to do a lot of product training lately because of all the new people that started. Now the ultimate test that will make or break me is multi-tasking on multiple projects. Contrary to popular belief, not all women are good at multi-tasking. I suck at it. I prefer focus on one thing at a time. I get REALLY overwhelmed when I have to do too many things. And I have a tendency to stress out. I don't really take things in stride. But being able to handle stress is like a muscle; you just have to slowly train yourself to develop those stress handling muscles. We'll see how long I last. I have no interest in seeing how far I can stretch.

Even my boss was like, "Can you handle it? I'll help you as much as I can." It should be a fun challenge though. I'll have to negotiate salary when it gets really tough.

My stock options

I've been with the current company for about 8 months now. There have been numerous structural changes since the time I started. I was like the 22nd employee and we now have about 50. We are still hiring people on a mad frenzy. And there will be even more structural changes. I do not know what my job description will be like in a few months, but I'll just ride it out for a while. If I start disliking the way things are here, I will start looking elsewhere. My stock options may or may not be worth something in about a year. I hope we do well resulting in me making some money. I never made a cent from stock options in the past, but maybe it'll be different this time. But after this gig, I want to do something else totally different. I should think about it.

Russian sounds like fighting sometimes

I manage a group of Russian developers so I get on a nightly conference call with them. This duty however will be taken over by someone else, which is probably good for me since my evenings will be free now. Anyway, sometimes, the Russian developers talk among themselves because it's too difficult to communicate everything in English. They're usually discussing programming issues when they're speaking in Russian. But it's funny listening to them because they sound like they're sort of yelling or talking loudly at each other out of anger. I don't know if that's what Russian generally sounds like, but I'm always wondering while I'm listening whether they are arguing about something. I took Russian in college but we read and pronounced everything slowly and none of it sounded angry.

Structural changes at work

Whenever a company is growing, it's expected that there are lots of structural changes. I just talked to my boss and he told me of some new hires I didn't know about. They are more of the senior positions who will be taking over managing a few of our products. That manager and architect may replace the current team that I am working with. I really don't want to be the person to tell my team that they don't have jobs possibly in a few months. I always knew that eventually, we'll bring the development in-house. But this became more concrete with hiring of the manager of the application I'm working on. I don't know what that means for me. Probably less management duties for me. Perhaps I'll be switching over my management focus to the Indian test team. Also probably more release engineering duties. When a company is small, you get to fill in for many roles that are not defined yet. But as the company gets bigger, everyone's duties becomes more specialized. When I started 6 months ago, we had 25 people in the office. Since then, we've tripled that number. And in that time, we hired many senior management in every department.  It should be interesting to see what happens in the next 6 months. Times like this, I keep thinking about starting my own side business.

Work is a little stressful

There are times when I am very unmotivated to do just about anything at work. But I snap out of it and think about how I should at least do what I'm paid to do. And as a person who believes in God, I think I have to hold my end of the bargain. It's only fair. I know that a lot of Christians hold to the belief that they should do everything with excellence and do everything as if they are doing it for God. But I really can't subscribe to that for everything I do. Seriously people?

I am thankful for my job. Really I am. It's not too stressful but at the same time there are some challenges and opportunity for growth. I manage a team of developers and testers remotely (Moscow), and will take on another remote testing team(India) coming next month. I'm basically in charge of the development and releases of one of our main applications. So I do some people managing, delegating bug fixes and feature enhancements, lots of testing, delegating testing, and giving the approval for product releases. So I guess I'm like a lead for development and manager of QA.

It's been a bit busy this week. We have a release planned that has dragged out for weeks. I'm a little stressed out because there are expectations from management to hurry up and release. I guess I'm a little more motivated than I was all last month. In the future months, there is going to be a lot more work for me to do, with new hires and new applications/projects developed. I want to do a better job and not be so short-sighted and complain about getting bored at work or about how I want to start my own thing, whatever that may be.

Also, work can't fix your blaise state in life. I think I need to change some things in my life to shake off this general sense of apathy. I probably need to exercise again. I gained a little bit of weight. I'm not depressed or anything. Just not really motivated as I used to be. I've come a long way from last year. I need keep moving forward.

Decorating the office

I'm a total geek and am at work. It's 10PM Sunday night! I came in for a couple of reasons: 1. I have some work to do and 2. I wanted to set up my Christmas Tree. I don't have any room in my apartment for a tree so I opted to get one for the office. I'm very happy with it. It'll make my workplace feel more cozy for a month. It stands 5 feet tall, right next to me on a table.

Here it is with all its' adorned glory. Did I mention, I love red?!

I love it!

Christmas Decoration at Home - aka Crate & Barrel Shrine

Here's my everthing's from Crate & Barrel Christmas shrine. With the exception of the glass case and some glasses, some of them were from Z-Gallery. But almost everything you see here, including the bar table is from Crate & Barrel becaue I LOVE that store! If (I said *if*) I ever get married, that is where I'm registering.

Here's the close-up of my favorite decorative piece.

And some lovely jeweled christmas tree cones. Did I ever mention that red is my favorite color? I wear it a lot and most of my furnishing is in red.

I'm very busy at work

Sorry people (my handful of readers)! I have been very busy at work. The company application 1.3 release is next Monday and I've been crazy busy. I'm the lead for the project. I am QA'ing and managing a team of developers in Russia who are working on this project. This requires that I work 9:30-7:00 or longer and then again at 10PM. At that time I call the Russian developers on Skype conference and give them directions and instructions for the day. That's been my life for the past week. It'll let up next week. I just want it to be Saturday. I'm tired.

I am crazy because I am at work

It's midnight and I'm here at work. I knew I would have trouble sleeping again tonight, thanks to my insomnia. So I decided to come into work instead and work with the Russian developers (who are in Moscow) who start at midnight. When and if I get sleepy I'll sleep on the giant bean bags until people start getting in at 8AM.

I hate my sleep troubles.