the thing I hate the most about my job

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For the most part, I love what I do. But there's one thing that continually drives me crazy about my job.

I've been living and breathing the next version of Office:Mac for the past couple of years. I've done mountains of research on it. Since it's coming out in time for your holiday shopping pleasure later this year, we're coming up on the home stretch, certainly for the user experience. My work on the UX is done early, long before coding begins. I know exactly what's in the pipeline and how it will work.

Today, I'm working on a PowerPoint deck [1]. This deck is a collaboration with my peers across the MacBU UX team. I'm working on it in PowerPoint 2008 because today's dogfood build isn't happy with a deck of this size. This, of course, is why I dogfood: when we find issues like this through real usage, we get to solve them earlier and it makes for a better product overall.

My issue isn't that today's dogfood build doesn't like my huge deck. The problem is that there's something new coming in PowerPoint that would make the particular thing that I want to accomplish today so much easier. I can't tell you what it is yet (which is why I'm also being cagey about what I'm actually trying to do in my deck) -- ask me again when we start revealing the coolness about PowerPoint and I'll tell you all about it, how we got here, and why I want it so very much.

I know how well this new awesomeness works as it's designed. I've done a lot of research related to this, and users in my lab have told me how much they like it. They even asked me when they could get the new PowerPoint with this new awesomeness, because they have to do a task similar to the one that I'm trying to do today frequently. But the actual code for this feature is being written as I type, and it's not even ready for me to dogfood yet.

And that's what drives me crazy about this job: I know what's coming in the future, but I can't use it today, even though it would solve my needs as a user of my application. I'm not living in the future, but I know what the future holds, and I want it now!

[1] I have to note that it feels a bit odd to write a deck that has content about the next version of PowerPoint when I'm using the current version of PowerPoint. It's very meta.