The Disappearing Department
When I arrived for my first day of work, I was surprised to learn that my manager, Jamal, had left our the department the previous Friday to move on to greener pastures within UPS. Not only that, but two guys that we stole from TSG, Dan and Mike, had gone back because they were no longer needed. Also, one of the co-ops, Nick, was not coming back because he had gone to GM to do his thesis. To top things off, our lead programmer, Ray will be leaving us on Wednesday to go to region where he will continue to be a web developer.
Instead of filling Jamal’s position, the higher ups have split our office between two managers, Bill and Mike (different from the previously mentioned Mike), who are in a different office on the other side of the building. I later found out that we had been considered a "rogue" group. Technically, the facility should not have had its own team of software developers. To remedy this, it was decided that our group would slowly be phased out and our responsibilities be transferred to region, which is on the west side of town. As part of being phased out, we will no longer start new projects and instead only do minor fixes and changes to existing sites. We are going to slowly migrate all of our applications to the servers at region, where we will no longer have to maintain them.
This all has me a little worried. After all, I am a developer at heart and do not want to be stuck in a job that could end up making me do something like tech support or label auditing. Not only is that stuff not exactly my favorite thing to do, but it also has nothing to do with my majors: computer engineering and computer science. How will I be able to complete a thesis in a year and a half if my job no longer gives me the opportunity to solve a problem relating to one of my majors?
All of this might lead me to find a new co-op, possibly in a new location. Who knows? Only time will tell. All I can hope for is that it all turns out well.
