I posted recently about getting a promotion at Amazon and how different the new position is compared to my old position. I started my fifth week with my new team, called FXM for Fulfillment Exception Management, and thought I'd give a brief update. |Week #|Activities|% of tasks for new team| |------|----------|-----------------------| |1 |Wrap up chores from previous position|0%| |2 |AWS Hack Attack class|5%| |3 |Finish job management system migration|100%| |4 |Stability Week - Made sure stuff that needed monitoring was monitored, cleaned up some code, migrated a system or 2.|100%|
Without getting into too much detail (maybe I already have) the stuff I did for the first two weeks on my new team had nothing to do with it. The third and fourth week went much better but I haven't written a line of code yet. Week 5 is much different. I'm actually starting a decent sized coding project so I should feel more like a developer by Friday! :)
One last observation before I wrap up this post. In my last position I was in a large room with 3 or 4 other guys. As the Support Engineer position is very much a "junior developer" type role having several people in the room with different backgrounds and experiences really helps to facilitate learning and growth at the company. The problem is that it can typically be difficult to get any work done when you're constantly interrupted for help with a problem, etc. Now I'm in an office with one other guy and we're pretty much always working. The interruptions are few and far between which helps us to get more work done. Fewer "context switches" equals more work done.