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[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Fri, 12 Oct 2007, Joshua Boyd wrote:

>> Making the crossover from systems management to software development
>> is the best thing that's happened to me in recent memory.
>
> Are you still at Via?

Yep.

> New job inside the company, or was the Via job always development and
> I somehow missed it?

I was a Unix admin there for just over 18 months.  Now I write IC tester
routines, data-management/analysis/visualization software, and the
occasional bit of x86 assembly language code for frobbing our devices in
strange new ways.

The new arrangement is extremely rewarding.  People come to me with
problems, and I build things to solve them.  This is subtly different
from IT.  In IT people come to you because your stupid fragile crap
broke again or because their stupid PC is doing that stupid thing it
always does or because they don't understand why your services don't let
them do something they think is extremely obvious.  In short, customers
are always frustrated and usually think it's partially your fault.  In
software, people come to you because they have a need, and they have
faith that you can wave your arms and pull a widget out of thin air that
fills it.  It's a very personal level of problem-solving, and each "fix"
feels like you're actually making someone's world a better place, rather
than puttying over some broken junk.

I got into IT years and years ago because I wanted to write software on
the side, and didn't want it to be tied-up by some employer contract.  I
finally lucked-out and found an employer enlightened enough to let me
write software at work and at home, so long as I wasn't writing stuff at
home to directly compete with them or that exposes things about our
parts that are covered under NDA[0].

I use the term "enlightened" because the arrangement benefits both
parties.  Frequently, I find stuff that interests me, but I can't
justify killing the time at work to learn it (like "AJAX" this week, for
example) in the hopes that it'll be useful someday, so I play with it
during my off-hours.  I get entertainment/enrichment value, and get
good-enough at it that I can put it to use at work.

> Thankfully my family gets the difference.  Deb's family has a bit more
> trouble with the difference though.

I don't know that family really needs to understand it beneath some
superficial level of abstraction.  If they only see that one job is more
stressful and less rewarding than the other, that's good enough.  My
stress level approaches zero now that I no-longer have a pager sounding
off (very literally) 80-90 times/day.


[0] Once my workload dies down a bit, though, I -will- be asking VIA
     for permission to write well-documented drivers for their hardware.
     So long as they're paying my bills, and I'm using BSD and Linux, I'd
     like their stuff to be as well-supported as possible.  Decent Xorg
     support for their graphics chipsets and ALSA support for their
     higher-end audio chips would be a nice start.
-- 
Jonathan Patschke     )  "So far, 99% of illegal activity has been caused
Elgin, TX            (    by criminals."
USA                   )                                    --David Willis