Our doubts are traitors
And make us lose the good we oft might win
By fearing to attempt.
– Lucio, Measure for Measure, Shakespeare
Things are not going well at work for me. The on-call rotation saps sleep from me because I have insomnia, and sleep is vital for things like concentration, and concentration is vital for my self-monitoring (or attempts thereof) and, well, actually functioning in a demanding environment.
It should be as easy as moving to a team that doesn’t have a pager rotation, but those teams are far and few between where I work.
So, one was found. The transfer situation however is a lot like applying for a brand new job at my own company: five hours of interviews—seven if you count the initial screening interviews. The thing that gets me is that I couldn’t rock all the interviews, which is….
Well, let’s put it this way. I’ve been to many an interview debrief on the interviewer side of the table, and we don’t hire unless the candidate unanimously clears all interviews.
High bar? Hell, we try to make it higher each time. The idea is to only hire the best, the superstars. Of course, this leads to the interesting point that, at a certain caliber of candidate it becomes random as to whether we’d hire said candidate or not. It’s said (with data behind it) that half of any team would not hire the other half.
Realistically, I think they’re going to reject me.
So my morale is pretty low.
Not only did I have my interviews that day, I needed to get some of my normal work done, too. I think I felt shittiest when I had to leave a design discussion early (after about 50-some minutes in), which you never do in my team. The whole process has been engaging in days and days of deception of a team I had bonded with for years, even if my own bosses know about it and support it, and it all made me feel like an utter heel. AND tired.
I don’t really know anymore. I only feel ok when I’m in a restaurant around other people; then I can read books and Twitter and so on. When I walk out, I fall apart all over again.
This all probably means something. But I can’t think all that clearly at the moment.
I just want to cry for the rest of the weekend, really. I have a really good start on that.
Spontaneous ∂erivation 
Oh, sympathies.
On a side note, raising the bar with every hire doesn’t seem like a very workable strategy. Even if they successfully hired the best person every time, that just means that pretty soon they would have hired all the best people in the world and be completely unable to hire any more. Enlarging the staff would not be an option.
Thanks.
I don’t think the strategy’s going to stop any time soon. It’s hard to argue with, as they say, success.
Have you thought about making a formal request under the ADA, “I’m a person with a disability and I need pagerless teams as a reasonable accommodation?”
I hadn’t; my company is already treating that as a reasonable accommodation, but I have to earn my way onto such teams. The transfer process has always been thorny, and they’ve made it worse over the years, unfortunately.