Getting insinuated into the process of a new workplace is always interesting. Sometimes it's easy. Sometimes it takes a while. Sometimes it just doesn't happen, and you remain a little island in your cube throughout your tenure. Nice one, Milton. Here's your stapler back. Luckily for Your Working Boy, my most recent transition has been quite smooth. I feel my most comfortable of any job since 2000. And that's quite a few J-O-B-S, sister.

Still, one area of rough sailing has been moving from a medium-to-large corporate to a small-to-medium consulting environment.

In the corporate world, the daily "speed of life" slows to nearly minus-infinity. Exceptions exist, but most corporate IT departments just seem to drift along with the current. Executive decisions arrive with astounding glaciality (note: not a real word), and response to those decisions is executed at half that speed. Over schedule? Over budget? Big deal. Other departments/branches/divisions carry us when we're off. "We're paying for you, so we better keep you nominally busy into the next decade" seems to be a prevailing attitude. As a result, it's easy to get lazy, rely on heavy estimate-padding, push development a little into planned QA time. Of course some people must always jockey for political position, which complicates things a hundred-fold. And in general, career growth pressure is actually negative. I remember reading Donna D. describe in a previous post that I can't find right now the piss-poor (my words, not hers) attitude some workers develop about picking up new skills on their own.

But in the consulting world, the focus on billable hours drives it the other direction. You NEED to get massive quantities of work done, but time is a scarce commodity, as is one's focus. You are split between projects, requiring you not only to budget yourself carefully but to max out your mental abilities keeping things straight between them all. Deadlines mean more because missing them means money directly out of the bottom-line. Reduced size = reduced politics = reduced focus on unimportant junk. A more team-oriented mentality pervades. And you get career growth simply by virtue of the fact that every client needs something a little different; there's always a new 3rd party interface or library to learn.

At least, this is my experience. Can you tell which I prefer? :?)

More on this later. Right now, I've got documents to edit...