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in reply to Handling Success

I appreciate the responses thus far.

The problem I have/had was it was a lot of good karma, from farther up the food chain than I am used to. I am not a contractor, but a full time employee. I had already talked to the people who are in control, about my whole resource issue. It's on them on how to best utilize my skillsets. It looks like things will change for me, its just a matter of how.

I was hoping for more feedback on mainly how to go on in my normal workspace, now that things have changed for me. I have become out of touch with the majority of the coworkers in my group. I've always attempted to remain close to my peers, if for no other reason than being aware of whats going on on the network. Unfortunatly this is no longer the case. I'm slightly frustrated by the fact of backing the new project, I have effectively distanced myself, and moved to the proverbial "them" group. I think it may be time for an official change of positions, and again thats slightly frustrating. I guess I was hoping to slip back into the stream and go on being mostly unnoticed and that just doesn't seem to be the case.

I would imagine it would be different in a contractor type position, as when the project is over, so is the job for the most part. You might come back for maintenance, might not. With a full time position its not so easy, or at least it doesn't seem so at this point. Life will go on and I'll figure it out, I was just hoping for some deeper wisdom, in regards to maintaining in the current workspace. Looking at my original post, that didn't come across, my bad.

use perl;

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Re: Re: Handling Success
by knexus (Hermit) on Oct 16, 2003 at 22:46 UTC
    Ah, you are a victim of your own success, which is a problem not uncommon to those who are competent at something. Far too often that results in people being pigeon-holed into one particular job, type-cast in a sense. Now, for some that's just great. However, this does not seem to be the case for you, as you are getting exposure, something that many want and find it hard to get. However, once the genie is out of the bottle it can be hard to get it back in.

    It's tough being labled "one of them", however, you may want to consider it to be an opportunity rather than a burden. Organizations can suffer greatly from separation between management and those who actually do the work. It appears to me that you may be in a position to a lot of good things for your company as a leader, should you deside to do so.

    If you want to just blend back into the woodwork, then time will probably take care of things. You may be getting a lot of attention now, but if you can successfully fend off the requests imposed on you by others (other than your manager) then eventually they will look elsewhere. People often have short memories and tech heros fade fast when they are not continually performing super-human feats of magic. I know you do not see what you did in those terms but the non-tech types often do.

    IMHO, you should consider very carefully your course of action here. You have stumbled into something that many often wish they could obtain... visibility to the muckety-mucks.

    Good luck

Re: Re: Handling Success
by dws (Chancellor) on Oct 17, 2003 at 08:06 UTC
    I guess I was hoping to slip back into the stream and go on being mostly unnoticed and that just doesn't seem to be the case.

    Good luck. In many organizations, once you've risen to the level of "competent", it's all over. You can't go back. You have to either find a faraway corner to go hide in for a long time, or you have to pack your bags and move to a company that doesn't yet know that you're competent.

    I was just hoping for some deeper wisdom, in regards to maintaining in the current workspace.

    There are several "tricks" for managing your career. One is to realize that if you draw lines around what you enjoy doing, what you think you're good at doing, and what the people who pay you think you're good at, you get a Venn diagram. There might be overlap there, or there might not. As you choose what you get involved in, you may find that you'll be happier when there's a lot of overlap. When there's not a lot of overlap, you're going to get pulled in directions you don't want to go.