Coming out of the maze

I am allowed to write about work again. After weeks of agonizing, an embarrassing number of flip-flops, several periods of threatening and bargaining, hours of meetings, and a lot of crying as if I had real problems, I'm officially planning to switch groups at work. Both teams sent out announcements about it today, which makes it real, although I won't move until July.

I'm not sure I've ever faced such a complex decision before. This involved, in part:

• Local manager versus remote manager?
• Be someone's first remote sub-manager... dicey... or be in someone's first batch of sub-managers ever, when you think that'll involve a major adjustment?
• User visible stuff with lots of cancelled projects and frustrating priority changes, or grungier less glamorous infrastructure with a better decision maker?
• Work for a major product, or a smaller team on which your mere presence will be vital for growth at your site?
• Work with superstar peers of varying degrees of friendliness, or unknowns who love you?
• Leave something you spent the last three years building some identity around?
• Keep a good relationship with a frustratingly flighty manager, or risk a steady-seeming but new manager?
• Work whose value is easier to prove, or harder?
• Manage two of your friends, who you like but that's the whole problem, or people less familiar to you?
• Greater challenge, or less stress?

YOU ARE LOST IN A MAZE OF TWISTY LITTLE PASSAGES, ALL DIFFERENT.

And it's impressive how my brain managed to take two essentially good options and worry that much about it all. For a solid 10 days there I was convinced that either option was BAD... I mean, that either one would be the defining mistake of my entire 30s and I would spend all my time gazing wistfully over at the team I wasn't on.

In the end, a wildcard came flying out of nowhere on Tuesday: a very good engineer who is moving to our office, who was interested in the same two positions I was and misses the chaos of working on the visible stuff. (Girl, have I got the group for you!) She has the capacity to be energized by things that totally drain me. One look at her and I realized that a) she's my perfect backfill... replacement, upgrade! no need to feel guilty about leaving if she's coming in and b) that shit does totally drain me. I really do need a change. That's that, then.