Career Break
I didn't go into work last week. I won't go in this week either. In fact, it may be a month or two before I go back. I'm on sabbatical.
Well, kind of. Typically, one gets paid for a sabbatical, if only half of the normal income. As Wikipedia informed me, I'm taking more of a career break. Either way, I've decided to take some time off to deal with a few things that have been bothering me lately.
The biggest issue I've been dealing with is burnout. It seems odd to be saying that - for the past six months I've been working on a brand new product that I helped conceive of and prototype a little over a year ago. I got to work with fantastic interns and some of the best developers I know on an interesting, useful project that I know many people will enjoy using. We got to use a modern framework with good tools and clean interfaces. In many ways, it is a dream project. But I left before it was released. The culprit is billing code.
It started right after my first internship in 2005. Copilot had just launched and all of the other interns had gone back to school. I stayed behind, deferring my Stanford admission three months, to keep the product alive and wrap up the few bugs and features that hadn't been implemented during the summer. On the top of the list: a subscription payment system. The idea was pretty simple, a tiered set of subscriptions based on minutes per month -- similar to a cell phone plan, minus the evil. The problem was, we could not find any payment processors at the time that could deal with variable monthly subscription fees. So we had to implement it ourselves, credit card database and all. I did the majority of the work; my econ second-major came in handy. Before I left at the end of the year, the new subscription system was in place and people were signing up.
It did well for Copilot. Sales doubled and doubled again. When I returned, I took over billing again. I help our support team work with customers billing issues, I fixed bugs in the system, and added little features to make some of the small pain points go away. Then about a year ago, we noticed Copilot sales were starting to plateau, so we set out to add new features and restructure the billing system. For my part, this involved a near-total rewrite of the billing system, sending me deep into the details of billing cycles, prorating, plan switching, and other tediously boring subjects. I spent months refactoring and months testing and bug fixing.
The problem with billing systems is that, technically speaking, they are not very difficult to implement, but they must be perfect. New features garner little praise, but errors will easily result in lost customers. And I had became the in-house subscription billing expert. Even after moving to the new project, I could be interrupted at any time if a customer got into a weird state or saw what they thought was an error on their statement. And of course, the new product would need billing code of its own. It had become inescapable.
The other main issue was personal projects. As you know, I put a lot of stock in personal projects. I feel that they are the best way to improve yourself as a developer, and a good way to keep you sane when your work projects head south. Unfortunately, the employment contract I signed as an intern (which still applies as a full-time employee) is ambiguous about IP ownership with regards to personal projects. In other words, it would be possible, though unlikely, that the company could take ownership of something, even though I had worked on it entirely in my own home, with no company equipment or expertise. (Unfortunately, New York does not have provisions like California and six other states, which prohibits employers from taking ownership of outside projects.) While I have no expectation that would actually happen, the ambiguity makes it difficult to justify spending any time on projects that I care about. That limited my outside work to projects I'd had gotten excluded about a year before, when the policies had not been so rigid.
So I took some time off. So far, I've been working on things that I've had to put on the back burner for the past year, including a big new update to the eBay Toolbar. Working from home has been relaxing. I can set my own schedule, and work without interruption. The biggest thing I miss is the social interaction with my fantastic coworkers. I may be returning in a few weeks, or I might take another month off. I'll be updating as I get further into the break.
Thanks to wit for "Fishing at Blenhiem", zzzack for "money roll", and TheGoogly for "Time Card".
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