Lol @ the speeding ticket. That sucks. Maybe you should have said "officer, I just quit a job I had come to hate, can you cut me some slack?". But maybe that would end with you getting shot 20 times.

What does the driver's training entail? Do you actually have to attend a physical class or something?

Good luck today btw - let us know how it went!

Nah, no physical class, you can take it online. It'll basically involve logging into a website and watching videos, reading shit, and answering question for like... I dunno... 6-8 hours? They time everything, so it's hard to make it much shorter, but whatever, no big deal. I'll also have to pay the class fee and the ticket fee/court costs, so maybe $250 total? Not sure, but it's honestly not enough to really worry about. I'll be fine. Mostly it's just annoying.

Driving school on one screen, Netflix on the other then.

yup, pretty much. Easy peasey.

On topic, I'm now 3 days into my new job. It's tough.. there are so many things I don't know and I'm constantly feeling overwhelmed... but omg, it's such an improvement over where I was. I'm really looking forward to finally starting to figure everything out. I will excel. I'm almost giddy with excitement.

That's good to hear. Enjoying the job is half the battle. I used to love GAME before they got successful, was so much fun to work there and it made me try my hardest. Once they turned into total knobs to work for I stopped trying. So here's hoping they're not putting up a front to ease you in

hehe... no, definitely not putting up a front. Shit went sideways for them so they ended up working today (Saturday) to fix a variety of pretty major bugs in production code. Nothing for me to do because I'm still completely clueless. Some things are starting to click for me, though. What's funny is I'm a developer and I haven't even started trying to write any code... it's just learning the environment, tools (at a general level), and an overview of the structure. I've got to admit, it makes me nervous.

Haha I get it, but you'll fucking crush it man. And it sounds like the ideal way to ease in new employees...give them an idea of how everything works from a macro perspective and how the teams and departments relate to each other before getting stuck in the specifics. Nothing worse than being immediately slotted into a new position and put to work without really knowing what you're doing and what your place is in the greather whole. I've worked for companies like that and we do it to our new outsourcing staff too, as we demand new people to be up and running answering customer questions within a few days or so. Training doesn't give you productivity for your money. I don't need to tell you how bad it gets when people are supposed to start off answering questions from customers about a product that they probably know even less than the customers asking questions (as they don't even use our product themselves). So fucking stupid and short-sighted!

Anyway I've been in Belgium for 2 weeks now working from my parents' house and will stay here until at least the end of the year. I did a 7-day quarantine after arriving here (in a separate room) and then got tested - negative bitcheees. Since then I've basically embedded myself in my parents' household and don't have to worry about masks etc here anymore. I thought it would be nice for them to have at least one of their children with them indoors on christmas day as my brothers can't join with their own families (risk is too high). So yeah, thanks again for making this possible, working from home!

Haha, that's pretty cool. Congratulations on living with your parents again!

So I actually fixed my first bug this week. Spend about 12 hours researching, following code paths, getting the debug environment set up, and then changing "SHA1" to "SHA512" in 2 places. So, yea, my fix was literally 4 characters and took 12 hours. That's not really realistic... since my fix was in a helper method that other places use, I had to search around to make sure I wasn't missing some other place where it was being implemented as SHA1. Still, funny stuff. And fine. I'm feeling at least marginally more comfortable now. In another month I may be putting in fixes that are 20 or 30 characters long. Watch out!

Late in but well done on your new job Satis!

Thanks Derf! I'm still employed at my new job and doing stuff! It's funny because I'm better at front end dev than probably anyone else in my team, so slowly people are coming to me for questions about front end development work. It's nice to actually be useful. I did spend like 20 hours changing some loading animations in this sprint... that's a tad frustrating because it shouldn't be that hard, but mostly there are some... communications issues. Bleh, it's fine, because I'm slowly understanding what's going on. Just shy of 2 months into my job, I'm comprehending probably 20% of what I see, and this is apparently not bad. So hey... in another 4 months I might be considered marginally competent.

This may sound like grousing, but I'm still quite happy in my job. I'm learning so much, and that is amazing. And despite some frustrations, my job satisfaction is (at least currently) quite high.

How about you guys. How's work?

That all sounds good Satis! Especially comprehending 20%, been doing my job 9 years and don't think I comprehend that much If they're already coming to you, I think you might be running the place in a year

We had a nice hamper over Christmas from work due to not having parties of course. Wasn't expecting it, had a bottle of wine, small jars of jam and marmalade, some chocolates, cookies, shortbread and chilli nuts in. And then last week we all had another surprise of a "working from home" gift box which included a nice notebook, some more chocolate and a thermal water bottle. The actual job is still shit though and potentially going to get even shitter. The role change we were supposed to have in Nov still hasn't happened but might be soon and the way it's been described is we essentially get rid of the boring but easy bits of our job and keep the annoying bits, like running calls with moron project managers who don't know what they're actually delivering. Still it's a job and it's a steady one which is as much as can be hoped for at the moment really.

Nothing official yet, but it's looking like I will be changing jobs. Did an interview on Monday, and got an unofficial confirmation that they wanted me a day later.

It's for a large administration so the actual official job offer and salary etc will take some time but knowing the wages over there it's likely gonna be fine.

It's a step back in terms of responsibility but I'm hoping that it's eventually gonna be a case of "one step backwards, 2 steps forward". The current field I work isn't very respected and not very profitable, and I felt like I couldn't grow much in my current job anymore. On top of that the company has been cutting costs for years now, lots of experienced people have been leaving the ship even if it isn't sinking quite yet, and things are only looking to get worse.

Anyway like I said no official offer yet, so let's wait and see. Could still be that it's shit and I have to stay in my current job.

Ah, good luck! Getting a new job is always stressful and exciting at the same time. Maybe you'll even tell us what you do for a living some day.

I'm still working at my new job, which isn't so new any more. I'm very close to my 2 year mark. The shine and sparkle has worn off... there are a lot of things that really annoy and/or frustrate me. I have no plans on leaving quite yet and the company is aware of many of the issues. We'll see how they address them. It's in my best interests to hang around for another 2-3 years, due to vesting of various benefits, so I'll probably be at least attempting to do that.

Shiny hates her job. Unfortunately her industry is not doing well, so she may be stuck. Today she's been forced by her company to do volunteer work. Why so many companies think it's ok to force their employees to do menial labor that has nothing to do with their official job function is beyond me. Last time my (previous) company tried to force that I just called in sick.

Ooh fingers crossed for you Ox. To fail of course. Will you still be in France or could you be moving again?

Sorry to hear the shine has gone from your 'new' job Satis, and that Shiny's is so crappy! Surely if it's forced it's not really volunteer work?

I have two updates in a sense haha. My role got shut down in April this year. I was off work for 6 weeks with my elbow op and the day I returned to work our boss called a meeting to say they were getting rid of our team role. But they wanted to keep us all luckily so myself and another part time colleague got shunted over to the service desk to help look after some of the processes, see where things fail and improve them, that sort of thing. We've been doing that and slowly finding our feet which has gradually swung around to doing a lot of Excel reports for me, and my colleague has become more of the internal database system expert. Now our boss (same one as before, he's always the manager's boss) has said he might steal us to put in another team but still essentially do the same thing with reporting and processing. Nothing really changing otherwise. No increased pay of course.

Oh yea, increasing pay is crazy talk. More work, same pay! Or less pay if you're unlucky. At least you're maintaining a position. How do you like the job otherwise? Personally a job involving mostly Excel would bore me to tears, but I'm a weirdo.

Oh, also I totally had my hire date wrong. I actually hit my 2 years on December 7th. Whoops! So yay me, I've hit 2 years!