40 lines
1.8 KiB
Markdown
40 lines
1.8 KiB
Markdown
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---
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title: "Passing the Torch"
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date: 2020-09-30
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description: ""
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---
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When I left my last job, I was lucky enough to do so on great terms with
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everyone there. It was all very _the circumstances are what they are -
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nothing to be done_. So, when I put in my notice, I was asked to spend some
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time showing my replacement the ropes, and I was surprised by how much I
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enjoyed it!
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Much as I did like working with the company, there was a thing or two that made
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my own onboarding a bit weird. The first day of the job basically began with,
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"You know some C? Go fix an enormous memory leak in this Linux driver."
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> "Okay."
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I enjoyed the challenge, and it worked out alright, but it was definitely a
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rough way to start. Worse, it took forever to figure out what people even
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_did_ every day. Evidently, I was on a team of 3, but it was days before I
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knew who my teammates were, and weeks before I figured out what they were
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actually working on.
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So, I wanted to save my replacement some time. Most of it was just saying "the
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device we're working on is designed to do _this_, your teammates are these
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two, who work on _that_ and _that_, and what you'll be doing for the
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foreseeable future is _this_". So it wasn't exactly excruciating. I just
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tried to clear up some of vagueries I dealt with at the beginning. Sometimes,
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it also made sense to help them brush up on C, which, as I've [mentioned before](/posts/c),
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I'm unreasonably happy to do.
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It was hard in a few ways, because at this point the company did most of its
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work remotely. I never actually got a chance to meet the person replacing me,
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but I still enjoyed teaching, and I hope I made their life a little easier.
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I'm definitely not clamoring to lead a group based on one, "I taught someone
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some stuff and then _left before there could be consequences"_, but I
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really liked my brief excursion in it, and I'd be happy to try again!
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