Bad News from Work…

I got bad news today at work… No, not a layoff.

But the economy has shut down some projects, as I may have mentioned before. Specifically, it shut down projects there were intended to replace my largest, most complex Notes apps. These two apps are the ones that will make or break this migration, as they are used across the entire company, and too complex to migrate without significant custom development on a new system.

They also are no fun to maintain. I commented on Twitter that I should start a Notes Dev Hall of  Shame, and almost all the code I am thinking of comes from these two apps. My mind reels at some of the crud I am finding. Oddly, they are not all bad. One app does have some really good code in it. But it has been shuffled from developer to developer over 12 years, and the last good developer looks to have been around 6 years ago. Admittedly, that guy was awesome. His code is good, readable, and his comments not only tell me what is going on, but make me laugh, too. The guy had a great sense of humor. Sadly, his code is sparse in the app at this point.

In any case, the migration suddenly looks less likely to be completed in less than 3-5 years now, even if I do everything but these two very quickly. My job is looking to turn into a stagnant Notes development job, working on an old version, maintaining old apps, with nothing new on the horizon…

Well, nothing new other than SharePoint. I’m sure it will not come as a shock that theSharePoint work doesn’t excite me.

But when I was hired, I thought I was walking into a great team, with good code, and a company that was going to put some resources behind moving to a new platform, and gaining new skillsets to help expand my career options. Now that I know that, well, none of the above is true, it is becoming more and more difficult to stay positive about this job.

I do recognize that many people, including some excellent folk in the Notes community, are seeking jobs, so I am thankful to have a stable job.

But long-time readers of this blog will recognize that my tone just can’t stay positive. I’m craving a real development job, not sitting in a cube farm doing maintenance work on a platform going nowhere. Especially when I know that both Lotus and Microsoft offer directions for the apps…. but we aren’t choosing either path. We’re sitting. And sitting. And taking tech support calls. And fixing some bugs. And sitting.

I’m thinking I may have to look for new work, but recognizing that the odds of actually finding any are slim at this point in time.

But to combat this negative lethargy, I believe that I will start sharing some of the crud I’m finding very soon. I decided that I don’t have the time to create a separate site for it, but I’ll create a new category on here. This may change the overall theme of the blog a bit, but with the migration slowing down, there isn’t going to be a whole lot to share anyway over the course of 2009…