I don’t think I wrote a post specifically about my last position change at work, from back in October 2022, but I guess I hinted at it in this post. At that time, I went from being a “Senior Application Developer” to an “IT Solutions Manager,” with three direct reports. And those folks were CRM developers, so I had to start learning CRM.
That all went reasonably well, I think, but there have been a lot of changes recently, and one of those is that they don’t want managers with only a few direct reports. So they’re taking all the programmers reporting to me, and those reporting to a couple of other senior folks, and putting them all under one manager, who will now have about a dozen direct reports. So now I’m back to not being a manager, and I have a new title: “Sr. Advanced Applications Developer – Lead”. Kind of a weird title, but it’s fine, I guess.
I updated my LinkedIn profile. I’m wondering if the nine-month stint as a manager looks bad. The change was only done because of a desire to have fewer managers with more reports per person, not because I did anything wrong. But I could see a potential employer wondering why the position only lasted eight months. Oh well. I’m not looking for a new job right now, so there’s no need to worry about it yet.
Meanwhile, I see that back in that October post, I was talking about new stuff I was learning for work. I talked about Razor Pages a bit. I had planned on doing some other stuff with Razor Pages, but that didn’t get very far. I had a specific project I wanted to do that way, but it was decided that we should use Angular for it, since that’s our standard for front-end stuff, apparently. I started learning about it (and mentioned it here), but I haven’t gotten far, and the project I was going to need it for has been put on indefinite hold.
Today, I spent some time trying to learn about Sumo Logic, which is going to replace Splunk for us. I’m a little annoyed about that, since I’ve managed to learn a good bit about Splunk, and I have a bunch of saved queries in it and notes on how to extract stuff I need. So now I need to relearn all of that, in a new system. Sumo Logic looks like a pretty good system, honestly, but learning new stuff all the time gets tiring as I get older. Sometimes, I just want the world to slow down a bit and let me catch up.
And one more semi-related subject: I noticed today that, in Outlook, the old interface for managing tasks is gone, and the Microsoft To Do interface is the only way to access tasks now. I’m not fond of that interface, but I guess I’m stuck with it now. (It might be possible to turn the old tasks stuff back on, but I’m guessing that it’ll eventually go away completely, so I might as well get used to To Do.) I’ve blogged about my many troubles with task management at work several times, most recently here, I think. My current system is to use Planner for long-term reminders (since Outlook items get deleted after a year) and now, I guess, To Do for short term stuff. That’s not great, but it’s the best I can do in our environment.
I’m going end this post with a link to a comic strip I included back in that October post. Still true.