After college, I went to work at TripAdvisor in Newton, MA as a "full-stack engineer" randomly assigned to an internal-facing tools team (dealing with i18n, content management, etc. essentially everything for product admin except review moderation & anti-spam)
I worked in a cubicle, I was assigned very specific well-and-narrowly speced work, and wrote a buncha jQuery.DataTables, Bootstrap CSS, and Java, endless Java.
After 5 months of diminishing returns, I was PIPed.
Because I was on this internal tools team, we self-managed our app lifecycles (unlike most of TripAdvisor), as well as having a bunch of batch jobs that were cron scheduled and just sent emails (maybe) if they failed.
Pulled from core work, I was put on building out a scheduled jobs interface w/ better configuration & logging, and some deploy automation, using Jenkins. I found this work:
I worked in a cubicle, I was assigned very specific well-and-narrowly speced work, and wrote a buncha jQuery.DataTables, Bootstrap CSS, and Java, endless Java.
After 5 months of diminishing returns, I was PIPed.
Because I was on this internal tools team, we self-managed our app lifecycles (unlike most of TripAdvisor), as well as having a bunch of batch jobs that were cron scheduled and just sent emails (maybe) if they failed.
Pulled from core work, I was put on building out a scheduled jobs interface w/ better configuration & logging, and some deploy automation, using Jenkins. I found this work:
- fiddling with shell scripts,
- stringing together workflows,
- shipping around artifacts
- learning & documenting & improving how things fit together
much more to my liking, and as is rarely the case, I actually satisfied the terms of my Performance Improvement Plan and was put back in good standing.
But a month or so later, slipping again, I was offered a last chance or severance and chose severance.
During the following job search, I took on some freelance work and used the freely available resources to learn Chef (which I had encountered but not dug into during the Jenkins work) and did first work in AWS
But a month or so later, slipping again, I was offered a last chance or severance and chose severance.
During the following job search, I took on some freelance work and used the freely available resources to learn Chef (which I had encountered but not dug into during the Jenkins work) and did first work in AWS
