Yesterday afternoon my manager walked in and asked me if I’d like to become a software lead for an upcoming project. It’s a move up, of sorts, though probably without a pay increase.

For the past 6 years, I’ve been just a software engineer, which means that I just get assignments to do software changes, and I do them. It’s been a fine job, I’ve learned a lot. As software lead, I would basically be responsible for making sure all of the software changes get done for the project, making sure they are done correctly, solving any of the difficult technical problems, setting up the development environment, creating the releaseable software… wait, I guess that’s stuff I’ve been doing at least a bit of in my current position. I guess my last few years have served me well. :-)

The one thing I am not looking forward to is moving from a Windows-based development environment to a VAX-based environment. Not that I’m scared of moving away from GUI to command-line - heck, I prefer command-line; but I hate having to learn a whole new tool set. Oh well, it’s the one development environment I haven’t worked with yet in 6 years, so it will broaden my knowledge. Or something like that.

It’s a little scary moving up to this position, but not too bad. I had originally been told that I was going to be the project engineer, which would entail a lot more document-writing and paperwork. That was much scarier. This will just be a good move up the chain. I think I’m starting to look forward to it…