A little sweat ain’t never hurt nobody…

I don’t ever wanna drink again.
I just… Oooh, I just need a friend.

Amy Winehouse, “Rehab”

Well it’s that time again. I has done been reviewed by my company. I think back a year ago and I was so pleased to have excelled in my job and gotten appropriate compensation plus a promotion, yadda yadda. Now, once again, I’m making more money than I ever have at a job in my life, I just wish I liked the job. A quick survey of friends and the web tells me that this percent increase is a very good one, so that does make me happy, but otherwise it’s kinda *meh.

I like what I do, sometimes I even love what I do. I just wish I were doing it somewhere else. I’ve been with my current company for 4 years. Pretty much my entire time in DC, I’ve been doing gov’t contracting and web development while trying my best to avoid management. I know it’s for some people, but it’s really not my cup of tea. I’d rather do work, not concern myself with making sure others are working. I sometimes say that my dream job would be to sit in a cube (or office? — pipe dream!) with stacks of incoming tasks that I’m allowed to just work through and complete. I’m not so awkward or misanthropic that I hate meetings or socializing with my co-workers, within reason on the job and cuttin’ loose off the job.

Obviously now isn’t the best time to look for a new gig with the holidays coming up, and even after that, one considers what you stand to lose and stand to gain by switching jobs. Should I just suck it up and stay here until, like my last job, they just lay me off? Even if I feel like I’m a little too valuable to be let go, I know that it’s certainly a possibility.

The other thing is feeling like you’re completely outclassed when you look for jobs these days. When you’ve been working in gov’t sites for so long, you generally do “boring” stuff. Straight HTML, some graphics work, nowadays more CSS, but unless you have coding background, you don’t deal in Oracle, Cold Fusion or any scripting except maybe very lightly. So I’m a bit behind on all of that. And I used to be able to do a lot in Flash, but I’m out of practice with that as well. Maybe I need to start looking at some classes or those lynda.com courses.