I love the company I work for.

This love has nothing to do with the excellent benefits; I love our narrow focus. It is in this focus that we can target with precision the needs of our customers. This precision translates into a staff here that is excellent at what it does.

Our customers have many needs. They desire RadTherm and MuSES because it fills a hole in their design cycle where popular CFD softwares lack. But since we fill a narrow margin in our customers' design cycles, our role as programmers should be to make a user's transition across that margin as smooth as possible. This requires us to:

* Make our software behave in a way the user expects
* Lead the customer to design features that they need that they wouldn't otherwise notice
* Be proactive and responsive to the customers' needs

The job description that I followed to arrive in Calumet was a description of bug-fixer. To that I hold, and today much of my time is dedicated to bug fixing. As stated above, the first priority of the bug-fixer (and the company in general) should be to make our software behave in a way the user expects, which was the intent that motivated the job description in the first place.

I also have carried with me from my previous work experience the role of task-automation, automating as many processes as possible. (Is it possible for someone to be a cshell geek?)

I also really enjoy adding small features where the user expects them to be (mouse-wheel zoom, F1-help/search/index, recent files list, revert, “*” in title bar for the save-state). I believe there are many of the “low-hanging-fruit” tasks yet to do, but we've never touched them because of our efforts to bill as much work as possible.

Presently at ThermoAnalytics, the company strives to 1) be responsive to customer needs and 2) work along billable contract guidelines. These priorities often clash, and the clash has made the role of fixing and improving software a financially ambiguous task. Some contracts allow for this work but most contracts don't.

Other employees at TAI have the good fortune to be tasked with long-term projects that have a defined start time, a defined end time, a defined set of subtasks, and a defined billing source. As a non-ME, I have no access to that kind of work.

Too often, I find myself hearing “don't do that task because it's not billable.” Far less often do I hear “do specific tasks.” But our culture has historically been to self-designate tasks. Considering the constraints mentioned previously, I can no longer continue to work in a self-designate mode. I need company priorities linked to tasks that require my specific direction. From there, I wish to engage my passions correcting, automating, and improving our software.

I enjoy working with the staff at ThermoAnalytics, and I'm glad to know that customers like our product and appreciate our skill and responsiveness. My desires are to be an even greater part of that responsiveness, and to fully apply myself to that end.

Thank you for your time.
     Tyler Mace