| I spent 3/4 of 2017 trying to land a job. I've been at the company for a quarter. Its a big corporate monstrosity and they literally made me "train" for a month on how to do sales, customer service, and technician roles... Yeah I sat on a phone for 2 straight days taking phone calls with an engineering degree from the best school in the SE USA. Just trying to put that in perspective. I overlooked it because the opportunity brought me into a place with a lot of job opportunities. Its hard to describe without spilling the beans on who I work for. I was hired to do embedded programming work but I do nothing of the sort and just fix/cleanup code in C. My team is being broken up and I have a chance to work with someone who has a project that actually needs embedded work. He is abrasive as hell and corrects me all the time. I have tried to engage with him as much as possible over the last week. I am afraid even though his behavior is exactly what I envisioned as my best fit (I have worked with such a man before and I grew alot). I am also afraid because the CEO is moving to our building and the project is directly linked to whether or not the business is viable after the next 3 years. I know I can do the work as I have literally done the same kind of project before with a different standard (Project is a proof of concept), and I want to do this work as opposed to playing Barney's cleanup game with half assed projects. I liked doing Barneys cleanup song with that at my old job, but that was new frontier for me (CUDA). I have done all I can to make sure this man understands exactly what I am capable of doing on my own, what I will need to bug him about, and things I have no experience in. Trying to cover all my bases to make sure I am a good fit for him. Yet I cannot shake this feeling of whether it is a good fit for me. Its like trying to sleep before the first round of engineering exams but constant. In the end I decided to join his team because he used to subscribe to "embedded system design" magazine which is a resource I used to prepare for interviews. (Can someone point me to a company that will actually test me on embedded principles in a interview for an embedded position? Literally every interview asks things I learned in first year or a thought puzzle.) Maybe I feel to paranoid about all this because I went from producing 50x more at a startup to here where a simple change can get deadlocked for a week. Believe me I work frantically. I spend 80% of my time researching and taking notes since all the domain experts have quit (terrible benefits) and nobody seems to want and be able to assist me in a proper training rampup period (y'know instead of having me work a fucking call center). Everyone seems to barely know the part of the code they live in and honestly as I walk around productivity/attention is literally the lowest I have ever seen in my life. To this I try and convince myself its just the change of employer type and that other people are literally watching movies at work so I should not fret so much. Sorry for the wall of text, but the first thing I learned is that at corporate you have to cover your own ass. So it is cathartic to be able to express myself here. Any input would be greatly appreciated. I have no idea what I am doing. |
Your situation sounds quite like any other big corporate. Lots of people not doing anything or working very little and manages that can be really picky and hard to get along. I am not sure what I would do, getting into that team seams like a way to go, but working with that manager sounds very difficult. Maybe give it a go for few months to see if you get along with him? If not, start looking for a new job, while you are still at your present one maybe.
It really depends on your character, I might not give the best advice cos I am tired of working for ineffective managers.