[This was partially inspired by this excellent article that I read Saturday morning.]

I manage two teams. One of them has been through a lot of changes in the last 12 months, basically taking a rather sharp turn in responsibilities and day to day work. This was always the plan because I believed that there was no better team to take over this particular process than ours, but when it came down to actually implement the changes clearly it was not what some members of the team had signed up for.

One day recently one of our strongest team members told me she wanted to move to another team.

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I know for a fact that there are managers in this world who would take this poorly. Best case scenario they wonder how the team member is going to be replaced and how it's going to affect the team members that remain. Certain other managers would worry about how this is going to reflect on them as a manager if one of their team members wants to move to another team.

The absolute worst response you could get from a manager is “no, I like you where you are” because this openly tells the team member that there's nowhere for them to grow in your organization. They would be better off finding a new job if they want something new, because there's nothing for them here but more of the same.

Then there's the manager that says “hell yeah, how can I help?”. I'm very glad and very lucky to be in this camp and to be able to contribute to others growing their careers, even if it's through nothing more than encouragement.

Be a booster. Be a leader, not an anchor.

#business #life #personal

I was thinking yesterday for some reason.

I was thinking about how much more inspired I felt to write to nobody/everybody this time last year. I was remembering how it felt effortless to expound upon the music business and software as if I had anything of worth to say. Interestingly, I think I did. Interestingly, now that I ostensibly know a lot more what I'm talking about I feel a lot more reluctant to blather about it. Less confident. Why is that?

I think it has a lot to do with not making my living on a stage anymore. Getting up in front of people and doing a confident, creative thing for a living has a lot of side effects that are good and bad. Playing music was a fairly easy skill for me to pick up, and gave me much needed confidence in my teens that I might actually be a talented individual. It helped me to cast off some of the negative side effects of non-jockdom in high school. It gave me a very clear and immediate feedback mechanism as to whether or not I was doing a good job. This feedback is kind of like fertilizer for the ego. Fertilizer can obviously help plants grow stronger than they ordinarily would, but if you don't use care in the feeding it can take over the whole side of your yard, just as letting the ego grow unchecked can lead to a lot more serious problems (and seemingly uncontrollable side effects).

I think this experience thus far has been a -little- lot like taking the pruning shears to my ego. It kinda sucks because I feel a -little- lot less productive and open right now, but I think that it's going to be a good thing for my long term spiritual health. Besides, I'm actually doing a hell of a lot more than I ever have before. I just doesn't feel that way because there's no crowd cheering when I do something halfway right. Strange, mostly because I disagreed with my shrink when he said something like this to me a few months ago. I didn't consider myself the attention craving type, which has turned out to be not-the-case.

When you prune back that bush, it looks a little ugly at first.

#personal

Seems a shame to have this site over here, ostensibly my personal site, and not be doing anything with it. Seems a shame because so much of the last four months has been so personal. It's been the hardest, weirdest, best, worst four months of my life so far.

I haven't really been in-between-chapters-of-my-life for a very long time, and I now remember what it feels like. It's why I moved back down to ATL to take some shitty job at the Guitar Center, just so I'd have something to do. I don't equate my situation with not having enough to do, BTW, but RRE at least gave me some kind of purpose. Rather, RRE made me feel like I had some kind of purpose. Even the last few years when I was pretty good and miserable, it still gave me something to rail against.

Now it's not my problem anymore.

Now I've got two boys.

Now I'm embarking on a new career that got a firm shove in a direction this week.

I'm in San Francisco right now, getting ready to fly back to Jersey. I've been on the fence for as long as I've been doing this dev thing about what exactly kind of dev did I want to be. So many cool technologies, so many cool paradigms, a few of them able to actually get done what I've wanted to get done since I started this journey.

I had narrowed it down to two frameworks – pretty much opposite each other. Rails – the exotic, well-heeled cool kid on the block – and Drupal – the giant open source free-for-all. I came to the DrupalCon this week and am pretty much in love. I met some great people, many working on ideas that are very close to mine, ultimately. When asked what I do I said “I'm a developer”. When they asked if I was a freelancer I say, “Yes.”

“I'm a career changer.”

Anyway, I got the same warm, fuzzy vibe from this scene here this week that I got at festivals. Hanging out with like-minded folks, learning lots of cool stuff, people serious about creating a movement.

I can now put aside my dreams of Ruby coolness for a little while.

I'm a Drupal developer.

==>

PS – people at DrupalCon think ignoredByDinosaurs is a cool name. They don't ask what it means, they just say “oh, that's cool.”

I'm home.

#personal