I didn't know what thread to put this in so here's one. today I realized that when I am in a good mood outside of work, work is unbelievably excruciating and I don't want to be here. when I am in a shit mood outside of work, work is not so bad because it's somehow therapeutic to bust my ass and carry a ton of heavy stuff and just generally be in serious work mode all day.
this is a common occurrence: customer asks an employee for some obscure health/natural/whatever food. employee asks me if we carry it. I do a google search because I've never heard of whatever they're asking for. this time it was "bean flax." there is literally no such thing as bean flax.
when the obscure thing they ask for does exist, we are such pushovers that we will order a case of it so the person can buy one and then never come in the store again. I think we finally sold out of $20 tubs of xylitol after ordering it for some guy like six months ago.
this is a common occurrence: customer asks an employee for some obscure health/natural/whatever food. employee asks me if we carry it. I do a google search because I've never heard of whatever they're asking for. this time it was "bean flax." there is literally no such thing as bean flax.
when the obscure thing they ask for does exist, we are such pushovers that we will order a case of it so the person can buy one and then never come in the store again. I think we finally sold out of $20 tubs of xylitol after ordering it for some guy like six months ago.
I moved to cali to work on the project I am on. And we've been fairly successful for the most part. But recently, I'm running into walls with people who really shouldn't be on this project. The problem is about half a year ago ( really more ) we lost a huge amount of our team... like everyone but me and one or two other lighter contributors.
And, the contractor I work for rather than rehire new staff made the infinitely stupid decision to simply take a few people they had with lighter work loads in other areas and shuffle them into our project. Then they randomly assigned two managers to the project who have ZERO experience in this area. Of course they didn't realize we had twice as many people who were each about 10 times as capable in this field of expertise. Because they are grossly incompetent.
I've spent the better part of the year kicking my own ass, and dealing with my managers in a way that in any other situation would have resulted in them firing me. I mean, I KNOW that I am rebuking authority left and right. I know that I am failing to complete tasks they assign me. And to be blunt, I just don't care and I do tell them that somewhat regularly, though usually in private. Not that I am afraid to throw down if someone tries to throw me under a bus. So far no one has been stupid enough to do that and let me hear about it. I really don't have time for that political BS and I have no problem dropping hard numbers on people. Something most of my team also is incapable of doing.
I have all the respect in the world for the people I work directly with. They are good people, and they know their jobs. But they don't have the experience necessary to work on this project, and they have no capacity to overcome the learning curve necessary for them to do their job. It's not their fault they are on this task, heck most of them would be happy enough to be off it. A few, rather annoyingly see it as some sort of career booster and are continually jumping in front of work loads they cannot possible handle well.... and thus making my life much worse in the end.
For a while, this was fine, I thought it was temporary. But months later, I find myself more often lately than in days past questioning whether or not I really even should be trying to keep the project alive.
Automation projects are big on larger lead times in major changes, because the goal is to run a lot of gear with a smaller team. That means major design changes require some heavier impact in terms of code / config / testing. But I can't meet the deadlines that we keep being handed. I've been forced to cut corners when I provide my managers with too much insight into what I am doing... and I did it at first just to demonstrate with an object lesson what would happen if they did. But they seem not to have learned despite clearly having been fucked repeatedly by their past decisions. Upper management is incapable of communicating the most basic points about our project because they simply don't understand how the thing works from a technical level at all. They have no experience in the field. And yet they refuse to let me show up at meetings because apparently no one wants to hear me drop stats on how fucked we all are ( seriously, I've overheard people talking about this. It's not some sort of conspiracy or anything, I just think they are so lost they think I am just putting them on, or being a bit hard on us all. That is definitely not the case. We are horrendously fucked at the moment. )
My operations team dropped from 5 very competent coders, 2 very competent developers / ops, and 2 ( well 1 and 2 half-time ) people to, one remote dev who is splitting an unknown quantity of time and sticking now to a very strict SOW, 2 systems ops where I am competent and can code and the other guy has spent the better part of the year just catching up to speed on how everything works. I am pretty sure he can handle shell scripts but little else.
We lost the network resource we had. We lost the security resource we had. Both very capable people. We have one part time network resource who is by no means the same resource we once had.
I've been begging for them to fill open slots in the team for over half a year. Quite literally BEGGING on about 4 levels above me. Now we have a log jam of huge tasks coming down the pipe, and someone wants to more than double the capacity of our west coast DC. All this... and still no new people. I finally recommend someone from our rare interviews to be picked up, and the infernal bastards above me are pushing back like they have some sort of choice in the matter.
I am going to be working in between christmas remotely. We're doing a datacenter shut down so contractors can get in to add capacity for new systems. So my christmas vacation isn't going to be so very jolly.
What's worse is... I've spent the better part of the last month turning myself into a full blown network engineer to redesign our entire network architecture to meet the needs of massive changes in our upstream resources. I'm not equipped for that work, and I've been getting my ass kicked learning things that I don't want to learn and to be blunt... it's pissing me off. This is NOT what I flew out here for. I'm watching the project fall apart around me, and every move my contracting company makes is another fucking affront to logic or sanity. And here I am now stuck in a quagmire of dynamic network engineering that is NOT my expertise rather than focusing on the tasks that are in my field of expertise and are far more important at the moment.
If I didn't truly believe in the benefit of the project, should it be successful, I'd have quit. If I didn't truly love working where I work, I'd have quit. And lord knows it's not like I am not getting flooded with some really cool offers as a result of my work there previously. I could be making damned near 2x my salary doing much more fun tech work if I left. But goddamn it if I still don't want to see the fucking project succeed.
What really gives me a headache. What made me give up well over 2 months of my life to non stop work / sleep / forget to eat in the summer, and countless other all nighters. Is that I really do want to see this thing work right. I want it to succeed. And I feel like every single person above me is just unwilling to give me the resources to make that happen simply because they refuse to care even in the slightest and there is no damned other reason. And that makes me downright angry sometimes. I shouldn't have to feel this way about a job, especially not one I like. I feel like I'm the only person who actually wanted this thing to succeed. Everyone else either cashed out, or tried to cash in and just never gave a shit.
And to put the cherry on top.
My financials are in the shitter for 2012 because of an audit problem ( ny state ) that is still plaguing me. I don't get nearly enough vacation time. And I feel like the only friends I have around mountain view are a group of coders I know whom I drink beer with on friday nights because none of us have anything better to do. And on the rare occasion I go beyond my friends in San Francisco become increasingly surprised to know I still live in California.
I am sick and tired of the same restaurants, the same food, the same streets, the same everything day in and day out. There's no freaking variety in mountain view, and I am too damned tired at the end of the day to do anything, hell usually it's too late to do anything. Right now it's 8:30 pm. I haven't eaten dinner yet. And I need to race out when I am done typing this or I either stay up till 11 cooking and cleaning, or I race to a restaurant before it closes to quickly eat something then return to do some more work.
And to top it all off. The heater in my apt is broken and it's been like 30 degrees every night for the past week.
I am having trouble finding much to be happy about atm. But at least I get to go home for the holidays. I have a couple good books for the trip. I'll see family for christmas. Friends for new years. And then... I'll be back in fucking mountain view. Until my lease is up in march. When I will almost certainly just take the rent hike and pay it rather than go through the pain in the ass of moving because by then I'll still have no idea if I just want to fucking quit and leave this hellish mess behind me.
Vent... vent... vent.
Not sure I feel any better. Maybe worse.
And, the contractor I work for rather than rehire new staff made the infinitely stupid decision to simply take a few people they had with lighter work loads in other areas and shuffle them into our project. Then they randomly assigned two managers to the project who have ZERO experience in this area. Of course they didn't realize we had twice as many people who were each about 10 times as capable in this field of expertise. Because they are grossly incompetent.
I've spent the better part of the year kicking my own ass, and dealing with my managers in a way that in any other situation would have resulted in them firing me. I mean, I KNOW that I am rebuking authority left and right. I know that I am failing to complete tasks they assign me. And to be blunt, I just don't care and I do tell them that somewhat regularly, though usually in private. Not that I am afraid to throw down if someone tries to throw me under a bus. So far no one has been stupid enough to do that and let me hear about it. I really don't have time for that political BS and I have no problem dropping hard numbers on people. Something most of my team also is incapable of doing.
I have all the respect in the world for the people I work directly with. They are good people, and they know their jobs. But they don't have the experience necessary to work on this project, and they have no capacity to overcome the learning curve necessary for them to do their job. It's not their fault they are on this task, heck most of them would be happy enough to be off it. A few, rather annoyingly see it as some sort of career booster and are continually jumping in front of work loads they cannot possible handle well.... and thus making my life much worse in the end.
For a while, this was fine, I thought it was temporary. But months later, I find myself more often lately than in days past questioning whether or not I really even should be trying to keep the project alive.
Automation projects are big on larger lead times in major changes, because the goal is to run a lot of gear with a smaller team. That means major design changes require some heavier impact in terms of code / config / testing. But I can't meet the deadlines that we keep being handed. I've been forced to cut corners when I provide my managers with too much insight into what I am doing... and I did it at first just to demonstrate with an object lesson what would happen if they did. But they seem not to have learned despite clearly having been fucked repeatedly by their past decisions. Upper management is incapable of communicating the most basic points about our project because they simply don't understand how the thing works from a technical level at all. They have no experience in the field. And yet they refuse to let me show up at meetings because apparently no one wants to hear me drop stats on how fucked we all are ( seriously, I've overheard people talking about this. It's not some sort of conspiracy or anything, I just think they are so lost they think I am just putting them on, or being a bit hard on us all. That is definitely not the case. We are horrendously fucked at the moment. )
My operations team dropped from 5 very competent coders, 2 very competent developers / ops, and 2 ( well 1 and 2 half-time ) people to, one remote dev who is splitting an unknown quantity of time and sticking now to a very strict SOW, 2 systems ops where I am competent and can code and the other guy has spent the better part of the year just catching up to speed on how everything works. I am pretty sure he can handle shell scripts but little else.
We lost the network resource we had. We lost the security resource we had. Both very capable people. We have one part time network resource who is by no means the same resource we once had.
I've been begging for them to fill open slots in the team for over half a year. Quite literally BEGGING on about 4 levels above me. Now we have a log jam of huge tasks coming down the pipe, and someone wants to more than double the capacity of our west coast DC. All this... and still no new people. I finally recommend someone from our rare interviews to be picked up, and the infernal bastards above me are pushing back like they have some sort of choice in the matter.
I am going to be working in between christmas remotely. We're doing a datacenter shut down so contractors can get in to add capacity for new systems. So my christmas vacation isn't going to be so very jolly.
What's worse is... I've spent the better part of the last month turning myself into a full blown network engineer to redesign our entire network architecture to meet the needs of massive changes in our upstream resources. I'm not equipped for that work, and I've been getting my ass kicked learning things that I don't want to learn and to be blunt... it's pissing me off. This is NOT what I flew out here for. I'm watching the project fall apart around me, and every move my contracting company makes is another fucking affront to logic or sanity. And here I am now stuck in a quagmire of dynamic network engineering that is NOT my expertise rather than focusing on the tasks that are in my field of expertise and are far more important at the moment.
If I didn't truly believe in the benefit of the project, should it be successful, I'd have quit. If I didn't truly love working where I work, I'd have quit. And lord knows it's not like I am not getting flooded with some really cool offers as a result of my work there previously. I could be making damned near 2x my salary doing much more fun tech work if I left. But goddamn it if I still don't want to see the fucking project succeed.
What really gives me a headache. What made me give up well over 2 months of my life to non stop work / sleep / forget to eat in the summer, and countless other all nighters. Is that I really do want to see this thing work right. I want it to succeed. And I feel like every single person above me is just unwilling to give me the resources to make that happen simply because they refuse to care even in the slightest and there is no damned other reason. And that makes me downright angry sometimes. I shouldn't have to feel this way about a job, especially not one I like. I feel like I'm the only person who actually wanted this thing to succeed. Everyone else either cashed out, or tried to cash in and just never gave a shit.
And to put the cherry on top.
My financials are in the shitter for 2012 because of an audit problem ( ny state ) that is still plaguing me. I don't get nearly enough vacation time. And I feel like the only friends I have around mountain view are a group of coders I know whom I drink beer with on friday nights because none of us have anything better to do. And on the rare occasion I go beyond my friends in San Francisco become increasingly surprised to know I still live in California.
I am sick and tired of the same restaurants, the same food, the same streets, the same everything day in and day out. There's no freaking variety in mountain view, and I am too damned tired at the end of the day to do anything, hell usually it's too late to do anything. Right now it's 8:30 pm. I haven't eaten dinner yet. And I need to race out when I am done typing this or I either stay up till 11 cooking and cleaning, or I race to a restaurant before it closes to quickly eat something then return to do some more work.
And to top it all off. The heater in my apt is broken and it's been like 30 degrees every night for the past week.
I am having trouble finding much to be happy about atm. But at least I get to go home for the holidays. I have a couple good books for the trip. I'll see family for christmas. Friends for new years. And then... I'll be back in fucking mountain view. Until my lease is up in march. When I will almost certainly just take the rent hike and pay it rather than go through the pain in the ass of moving because by then I'll still have no idea if I just want to fucking quit and leave this hellish mess behind me.
Vent... vent... vent.
Not sure I feel any better. Maybe worse.
TL;DR
Had a meeting with two of my managers this morning. pretty much came down to... "You realize you've allocated all of my time to task description documentation and worthless meetings? Now you are asking me for dates? Here is the date. Never. We're hosed. Game over we all go home." Silence.
wow. I read it. I am sorry.
when will you be back after new year's? i'll come visit you.
today we finally sold out of two pound tubs of xylitol.
back nowish... but i gotta move due to lease coming up for renewal and the cost of a renewal being absurd ( even for the area )... so I'll be focused on that.
Think I might move into SF proper.
Think I might move into SF proper.
awesome! do it!
let me tell you about something. we are paying people to set up an online storefront for our products. our inventory system uses a sybase sql anywhere database to store items. it's quite the database, and requires pretty complex queries to extract even simple information. anyway, the online store software they're using is php. there's a php module that allows connections to sql anywhere databases.
they claim to be missing the required library from their sql anywhere client installation. the error message says that it can not be found in LD_LIBRARY_PATH. I've asked them if this variable is set correctly, but they continue to claim that they are simply missing the library altogether.
I installed the sql anywhere client, apache, and php on my ubuntu server. the file is there. I set LD_LIBRARY_PATH in /etc/apache2/envvars. the php module works fine. this took me all of twenty minutes.
I don't think I want to know how much we are paying them; and I think that they are simply scared of the database. now my goal is to get them to admit this.
they claim to be missing the required library from their sql anywhere client installation. the error message says that it can not be found in LD_LIBRARY_PATH. I've asked them if this variable is set correctly, but they continue to claim that they are simply missing the library altogether.
I installed the sql anywhere client, apache, and php on my ubuntu server. the file is there. I set LD_LIBRARY_PATH in /etc/apache2/envvars. the php module works fine. this took me all of twenty minutes.
I don't think I want to know how much we are paying them; and I think that they are simply scared of the database. now my goal is to get them to admit this.
or lazy. welcome to the wonderful world of outsourcing.
lazy.