(no subject)

[ravencallscrows]

Back at work. Not overly happy with it, but there are things which are necessary evils, and at present, Office is one of them.
I've figured it out- i don't really want to work, but would rather just be well-enough off that i could dabble in whatever happened to interest me at the time for as long as it did. ;-)
As if that's going to happen any time soon. Actually, I'd just be happy, at least for the foreseeable future, doing something where creativity was encouraged or at least valued, which is i think by definition outside of testing.

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But wait, there's more (pt. 1)

[wingedelf.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but there's an ugly twist to it. We're closing on the mid-year evaluation position, which is ostensibly about determining where people belong or are interested in going in the immediate to mid-range future. On top of that, my department just reorganized, so it's under a new manager, and it has been ten months since my conversion.
An ex-MS employee who's been a friend since we were both at Humongous asked me to check on open positions within a particular games group. Nothing she was interested was open, but there was a position i wanted- a game design position, even the right level. When i got laid off at Humongous/Cavedog, I'd just finished working on my first design, which had been submitted to the former owner before the buyout, and i'd gotten word through back channels that he really liked it and it was probably one of the next two projects to happen.
Game design is pretty much what i want to do career-wise- it's creative and technical in a good mix.
So I went into my meeting with my new boss, which was ostensibly all about letting him get to know us one on one and letting him know where we want to go with our careers. So I want in asking to be allowed to pursue this one particular position, realizing that it was a little early- only ten months instead of a full year, but including my contract time, I've been in Office International for about sixteen months now; and that by the time everything went through, including an informative, interview loop as appropriate and all the internal transfer process, it'd be six to eight weeks, and therefore pretty damn close to my calendar year.
I mention to him that I'm really unhappy with Office, because it's too damn big a project to get a grasp on the big picture, and working in International I have to deal with the self-imposed ghettoization that results from having things seperated into core and international, rather than having all of test work together with certain testers having international sufficiency and localization responsibilities, and that my "dream job" is open in another department, and I'd really like permission to talk with the hiring manager about it.
My new boss tells me that, no, what I want to do is to assume the responsibilities of an automation engineer in addition to the test responsibilities I already have; and that he wants all of his team members to commit to staying with the project through RTM (which has now been pushed back to next March)
- another thirteen or fourteen months away, assuming it doesn't slide again.
Now, I'm not a coder. I have little interest in ever being a programmer. I want to understand programming enough to be able to tell what a piece of code does, not to write or debug it. I certainly don't want to have to learn enough of it to write my own automation in it.
All this right on the heels of having had a department-wide meeting- test, dev and project management in Worldwide Services- to discuss the purpose of the mid-year process. One thing in particular stands out in my mind as a take-away from that meeting- something that was repeated three or four times by the various speakers: "Keep people being productive and happy. Keep them in their groups where possible, in Office if not that, and at Microsoft if they don't want to be in Office anymore."

But wait, there's more (part 2)

[wingedelf.livejournal.com]

So, fresh from that, i felt pretty good about going into my meeting. I didn't expect my new boss to be happy about me wanting to leave, but i expected him to listen to why i wanted to go, and, since the primary languages we're working with are Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, Vietnamese and Hindi- none of which i speak/read/write (only a little Hebrew i haven't managed to foget from growing up), that he'd be reasonably able to replace me with someone who a) wanted to work in Office and b) had some ability in at least one of those languages.
Instead, i got told what he wanted and expected me to do, and it became pretty clear that not only wasn't i going to get permission now to go after the job i really want, but that it wasn't going to happen until next March at the earliest.
Accordingly, I've got pretty much a Hobson's choice- i can either sell out, and continue to suffer through Office in languages which in general look like toddler scribble; or i can find somewhere else to work- pretty disappointing, since there's an internal position i really want, have the qualifications for, and have the interest in pursuing. I'd feel better if i was given the opportunity to at least chase it down, and wouldn't have a problem staying through RTM if i didn't get the position i wanted but was at least allowed to have a go at it.