I’m only 8 months into my time at VMware, so there’s no way that I could be bored yet.  But I still read bored people quit from Rands in Repose and found something that applies to me.  He’s talking about how geek managers can avoid boredom in their people, and mentions this:

In terms of a low-cost means of keeping your team content, the simple act of saying, “I know where you want to be and I’m thinking about how to get you there” is a way to demonstrate you care about the growth of your team.

Now that I’m reasonably comfortable with my role and my team, I’ve started to think about what my next career move should be.  I want to grow in my career.  I’ve already told my manager that I want to get to the Staff level here, but there’s also an attendant question of whether I want to continue up the technical track or move into the managerial track¹.

In my weekly meeting with my manager this week, we talked about the status of my current research projects.  I’ve also got a couple of pet projects that are more internally-facing to help my user experience team rock, and I now have the green light to put some more energy into those.  In that meeting, my manager explicitly talked about my desire to move up and some short-term things that I should do to move that along.  I went back to my office thinking, “this is SO the right place for me”, banged out a bunch of emails and invitations to get some things moving, and went home with a glow.  As I talked to my husband over dinner that night, I realized that what really got me excited about this was that my manager had heard what I had said, put some thought into it, and came back with specific and direct feedback about how I’m doing so far and the next steps to take.

I’ve got to say: this engineer ain’t bored. 😀