Last few weeks has been nuts for me. Our project is kicking into high gear and I was tasked to do a lot of complex things at the same time they keep me involve in lots of meetings.

I'm sure everyone has days when they feel they can never catch a breath and you feel like you are very tired from these meetings and what not, but at the end of the day, you feel like nothing really gets done. When you rationalize it, you realize that nothing useful has been accomplished. Where has the time gone?

The worse thing is when you look up, all you see are your coworkers and friends' frustrating faces with bloodshot eye and deep sigh.

I am starting to ponder a question I'm sure most people already think about from time to time: do you really have to like what you are doing to be good at it? Do you just take the good with the bad and hope eventually you either get used to it or things would turn out well.

The answer for me is you don't have to like what you are doing to be good at it. I considered the frustrating corporate culture a necessary evil and necessary growing pain for me to grow personally. If I don't work at a big company I won't have a chance to deal with many different layers of organization and all sorts of people. Navigating this mess require a lot of tact and resourcefulness. In a very weird sense, I have actually become a much more well-rounded person and have a wider understanding of big organization and people in general.

I am a very talented software developer that used to just focus on doing the coolest thing possible with software system. Never have to work the room to convince many people at once, never have to spend a single second on anything that is not technically related to a project. Never have to write detail and bullet-proof legal documentations and procedure and standards everyone in the organization has to follow. I did not even know I have it in me to be business oriented and organizational oriented, instead of technically inclined.

Is it a waste of time? in a sense it is, but at the same time it's probably worth it. It just depends on your perspective: when you look at the things you do administratively like writing detail documents as a software developer, you probably would want to shoot yourself. When you look at the same thing as a business perspective or from a company perspective, you need to have the documentation to cover your butt and to follow the rules.

I always believe you can not complain about something if you can't come up with something better. It's quite simple when your boss asks you, “I know you hated this process, you can tell me what we can do better?" I would scratch my head and million possible scenarios played in mind, but at the end I just don't have the experience to come up with a better process. Or maybe there is no other solution, if there is somebody else would surely have it figured out since our company has many talents. I started to realize to keep a huge corporation running, there is probably no simple way to be efficient. With so many inter-relating things going on at the same time, it's probably necessary to have all these layers and structures.

Just some ranting to get it out of my system.

Tomorrow is a brand new day to learn and grow although probably in a painful way.