Tell yourself 10 times that you don't own that anymore

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2007/06/29 02:31 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2007/06/28/3595757.aspx


One of the issues that tends to pop up after something like Track change (a.k.a. A new job that has a few things in common with the old one) happens, when all of the following is true:

is that you get put on a lot of planning mails, invited to a lot of meetings, and asked a lot of questions by people.

You have to decide if you will (to avoid perhaps unintentional invitations to such activities) choose to take yourself off the old dev team alias (keeping in mind that your lead never took himself off of it even though he hasn't worked in the area in at least half a decade and one your current team members who left the old team at the same time as you hasn't either).

And you have to decide how much of your time will be spent above and beyond the usual transition assistance -- and how best to start cutting the cord on some of the interactions that feel more like people are somehow internally thinking you are still on the team.

Some of those people may even read your blog and consider posts like this one to be really chicken-shit, passive/aggressive way to encourage them to not be so dependent on you. But they aren't -- they are just you struggling with how to leave the other two thirds of your old job behind so that you can have every opportunity to succeed at your new job.

Then you notice that after a casual glance at current specs doesn't show anything in a random area you probably would have pushed for were you still there, and you realize that if you take the time to ask about it then there is no way to not look to reasonable people like a hypocrite who wants to stay to the same as they go, anytime something interesting comes up.

In the meantime, some of the engagements you are doing with other teams involve your old expertise, which is honestly not all that old. and it is not like you planned to rename your blog just yet, or stop answering questions in newsgroups or fora or aliases. Especially hen the next engagement you work on may start from one of those random sources.

So you breathe, you count back from ten in Greek, stop worrying about the one random question/invite/whatever that got you feeling all introspective and you tell yourself 10 times that you don't own that anymore.

And you feel better again until the next time. :-)

 

This post brought to you by (U+2122, a.k.a. TRADE MARK SIGN)


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