Meeting old friends
Today our company celebrated its anniversary. It was moved to this date from another date because of bad wheter back that time. Well, it hasn't been better today. It started to rain quite strong at about 3pm and went on with lighter rain into the evening.
For this anniversary our company even invited all ex-employees and people which are connected to it. Doesn't matter if our company had set them free or if they left on their own, everyone (from whom we could somehow acquire contact information) was invited. And as it turned out, quite a lot of the people who worked at our company some time in the past showed up.
It's always a great pleasure for me to meet my former work colleagues and long-unmet friends and exchange thoughts and experiences with them. I get a peek on what work they are busy with, how they work and what problems or chances they are faced with. And most of the time I can be sure, that work is almost the same in most companies and they all face the same problems and issues.
I also met my former boss who way back in time was the responsible person to have the final decision if I would get the job at the company or not. And I'm happy that he agreed. Altough he is not employed in our company anymore for years now, he is still some sort of motivation and acts as a model for me. I'm impressed how he managed to do what he has done, how he built up the connections he has and just how he seems to be successful with most of the things he touches. And when I talk to him I always get peeks into the other world of our business, the management and organisation world. The one, where things are much more volatile and political than in my developer-world.
I've always been interested in the management of projects or teams but until now I only managed to get small chances to get a deeper insight here and there. This may or may not be connected to my interest that I do not want to loose the connection to the hand-on engineering and development of software. And I have the opinion that when someone is managing a team or project this person should focus solely on this task and help the team by removing all obstacles for them but he should not join the development of software itself actively. But it's always been a tempting idea in my head...