flexagon | A victory

Working at Zillian is like living in one of those action movies where there's no villain; the slopes of Everest, or a runaway train, or the harsh landscape of Mars, is enough to provide drama. So here is my primal scream of "still alive" victory: that best engineer who was denied promotion, who I sweated out a comprehensive appeal for with the help of many others, was approved by the appeals committee on Thursday and, unless lightning strikes in the form of an executive overturn within the next few days, will be promoted to my level.

This is huge for my team and, unequivocally, could never have happened without me. For once I really did something. I found out yesterday morning, and spent the entire day in delirious celebration. My engineer gets his due, and, well, nobody will be concerned now about their chances of growing to staff level under me. This can't hurt my standing in the eyes of the new bossboss, either.

Between this, doing some actual email catch-up last week, and having a confirmed new hire starting in January to shore up my down-by-one logging config team, it feels like a streak of difficulties at work is at last turning around.

I raise my barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world!

(A note on confidentiality: managers at Zillian are deeply split regarding how confidential to keep the appeals process, not to mention the intermediate stages of promotion approval itself. But AFAICT, for senior engineering promotions the chances of not telling the person -- and half the goddamn team -- are zero, as you realistically are going to need their help in digging up whatever evidence the primary committee said was missing. So relax, fellow Zillianaires... he knows. Almost everyone involved knows. His new level will soon be public. And it's to nobody's shame, anyway, that the primary committee failed to see the awesome.)