Postmortem Posting

Because things tend to come in threes, we're going to describe my LM tenure in terms of the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

The Good:

Incredible office. Spacious, bright, fairly nice view of other office buildings, large windows, never too hot or too cold in my measured opinion. However, on several occasions, when people asked what I liked about my job, and I described the office in exacting detail, they would call me out on that, as I studiously avoided any reference to the job itself.

My coworkers. The developers, a good bunch of people for the most part. Not great across the board, because every group needs a bastard or two to really fill it out, but most of them deserve better.

Location. Great location, close to multivaried eateries, a mall, and NCI. And, close to where I now live, although now that I have left, there is no reason for me to be living in VA, aside from the damnable lease.

The Bad:

Misuse: Sometimes, I felt like an elephant gun taken to a pie tasting. Not only have you taken too much armament with you, you have also taken the wrong kind of armament to the wrong situation. Good job figuring that one out, guys.

The officemate: I have to keep telling myself that there are neither good nor bad people. There are just people that do good or bad things. In this case, V.M. was not a bad person. He just did things and acted in a manner that made me despise him.

Setting my own deadlines: This was partly on me. Given the nature of my project, I estimated X number of months to complete it, then found myself nearing completion in X/2 number of months. D'oh.

The Ugly:

The client: Never going to do government contracting again if I can help it.

The all-day meetings: The thing that rankled the most? That I was there to take notes, but my involvement in the meetings was otherwise at an absolute minimum. Near complete waste of my time. Now that I think about it, had I not gone, I would have finished my part of the project in X/3 months.

Large corporate vertical-oriented atmosphere: This ties into my completely unfounded and unscientific three degrees of influence theory (that government above three vertical degrees of separation is inefficient because those at the lowest level can no longer influence [or feel as if they are influencing] the uppermost ranks. Mostly an informal thing: "Hey, the friend of my friend blah blah blah."). I am so far below the head of LM, it really made me feel as if what I did was worthless and not going to have any impact whatsoever. Not that I need to have a global impact, I just wanted to feel like I was making some difference, and that wasn't really happening at LM.