Change
One of the constants in life, aside from death and taxes, is employee turnover. There have been people who have left my company before, but it has been a while since someone working longer than me has left. Work has been a little crazy these last few months, and while the craziness has not affected me directly, it has had some ripple effects throughout the company. I suspect that craziness has caused the departure of one co-worker today. Politics rose its ugly head, and how each type of person handled the situation differed depending on the position. Despite my bias in favour of my developer peers, I have been able to observe how the situation arrived at its current destination. Change is most definitely needed, yet it may require a genius feat of social engineering to pull it off considering the number of strong personalities at play.
Another co-worker decided to take a leave of absence to go sailing for four months. I don’t know if he’s actually coming back, although I hope he is. I’m not sure if I could ever take that much time off to travel; there’s something comforting about a daily routine of work that allows for some semblance of order. Not having any idea what the next day could bring disturbs that large part of my brain that encompasses my obsessive compulsiveness and organization. It’s true that the unknown and the unexpected add to the quality of life, but I don’t think I could take that much unknown at once. Of course, my co-worker has been at the company for more than five years now, so this could very well be an introspective to help him decide where he wishes to go next. Maybe those two GPS units he’s taking along will help him out.
Now that I’ve been working a couple of years, people often ask me how long I’ll be staying at my current job. I find that as long as boredom does not set in, and there’s some kind of fulfillment to the work I do, I don’t feel a need to change jobs. Of course, other factors play in, but that’s the general gist of it. Changes within the company itself, whether they come from company direction or employee changes, generally provide new challenges and opportunities. I suppose there’s a bit of unknown and certainty in all of that, both in the long and short term respectively.
Change causes adaption and re-ordering. Guess I have some sorting to do. Wonder if I can do it in O(log n).