Decisions

Last week, in California, I met the amazing Meggin who leaves such astute and beautiful comments here. It was great – or terrible timing – depending on how you look at it. Terrible timing, because, one of the first things I said to her was:

In a while I’ll spin this into a really positive sounding blog-post, but right now? I can’t do that because I’ve spent half this morning in tears.

Great timing because she gave me some good advice. So – rough week. I’m pretty chilled out travelling, but packing and timezone changes are still stressful, and I get claustrophobic in MTV. I spent the week jetlagged, came back, and I’m still jetlagged. I enjoyed the weather, wondering around San Francisco, and a day at MOMA. It was great to meet Meggin, and hang out with Maggie and John, and connect to other female engineers based in MTV who I had only seen on video chat.

Anyway, circumstances have meant that I’ve been figuring out what to do next. Stay on my current team with more travel, or move to a new team. I’ve been trying to work that out in the context of wanting to move back to Europe sooner rather than later, of enjoying what I work on currently, but being tempted by this other challenges, and not really wanting to spend so much time in California – it would be different, if I was going somewhere (a city!) where I’d actually enjoy spending time.

It’s been difficult – hence the tears, and the lack of blogging – I couldn’t write about this, but I was sufficiently absorbed by it to be unable to write about anything else.

Coming to a decision has really forced me to think about – what is most important to me? What compromises will I make? For the right project I could be willing to travel more, but the right project depends on a number of things, not just the project itself, but the people involved, and the potential for personal growth.

So I’ve been asking myself questions. What do I want to work on? What level of pressure can I live with? Who do I want to work with? How much will I compromise? How do I want to organize my schedule? What matters to me most? In the end, certain events made the decision was very clear, although still not easy.

I’m switching teams – I know, again. I’m going back to my original manager, and I’ll be working on docs. I’m excited about the project, the people on the team (50% women! Yay!) and I’m really happy – and lucky – to have this guy as my manager, because he’s awesome. They all are. The project is a really good fit for me, I hope. Social was too, and I am fortunate to have been part of that incredible experience, but – for a number of reasons – it’s time for me to move on from that, and this is, I’m completely sure, the right place for me to move to.