Right now my job has me up a tree. I have some really good excuses for the problems I've experienced, but my only option is taking responsibility despite them... which is frustrating and humbling, but not insurmountable.
People have, my entire life, accused me of having my head in the clouds. I think it would be ok for me to be that way as long as I didn't have to interact with customers. I suppose I have to learn some social skills. Right now my primary means of relating to people is to dig for the foundation of their worldview and try to let them do most of the talking.
I feel like even if I understand something well, it is just the part of it which I understand least that the customer is interested in. Maybe it's because the project is unfinished.
I have learned quite a bit from this job. I learned to never let other people in my code without strict supervision followed by immediate reorganizing; I learned to never let the customer try to calibrate a piece of equipment, even if he has the manual next to him (because if he messes it up, I get blamed); I learned never to leave even one commented-out part of the code unfinished in order to go work on another part; I learned that I should not trust even experienced people to work on my project without me unless they have had plenty of time for me to bring them up to speed; and maybe most of all, I learned that I should not take vacations within 2 months of a project closing.
I also noticed some areas where I need to learn more. As mentioned above, I need to work on my social skills. Specifically, I need to get used to not letting on that I don't know how to fix something. I really struggle with this, but the fact is: when a problem initially occurs, you don't know how to fix it until you figure out how to fix it. If you did, the problem wouldn't have happened or at least it wouldn't have been a problem. I've gotta learn how prioritize issues. At the beginning of the project, there were tons of issues, and I tried to tackle multiple of them at once. I also need to learn how to handle new tasks issued by the customer. The customer asks for "small things", and says, "that should be easy to put in the code, right?", and either he's wrong, or he's asked for too many "small" and "easy things". Those cases need to be change-orders, so that my hours are justified. I need to learn how to tell the difference between an easy thing and a hard thing, and I need to learn how to give non-answers to customers who ask me to do things, so that I can go to my PM first.
I've already got my next task assigned to me. It's gotta go better than this one did.
"And if you can't handle that..."
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