Well THIS bodes ill
For the first time in a very long time I spent Sunday night in nauseous anticipation of work. Sure, part of it was due to the vacation hangover problem (which is in full swing this morning.) But it’s not actually that ambiguous dread. There’s a raft of things I’m dying to simply not face.
I really love the XP thing and I’ve seen the benefits both in my own coding and on small to medium sized teams (upwards of 20 developers.) It’s interesting, painful (in that learning a new thing brain stretching way) and fun.
Dealing with management is also pretty interesting stuff. I get to take part in some pretty high level meetings for an organizational leaf-node, and I enjoy it a great deal. I’m a part of the decision making process at a level which allows me to be pretty solidly involved with the company. And that’s something I’m rather good at. Problem is I couldn’t really care less. This place could burn for all I care. I’ve no animosity. But if I woke up tomorrow to an email that said my company dissolved I’d miss a couple people and my felt bat decorations. The problem with that, in turn, is that I simply can not be made to pretend to care. Can’t do it. It’s not in me and it’s one of the things that I simply refuse to see looking back at me in the mirror.
So I teach, guide and coach people in Extreme Programming and in Agile practices in general, the motivation and principles behind it, the tools and technologies that facilitate it and the communication that helps business and developers actually understand each other. I do this in two scenarios:
One, when people come to me and ask enthusiastic questions, dying to soak up information and hear what there is to learn. That’s absolutely wonderful. There are a couple teams of people who just can’t get enough and who are really doing things, looking all over their code and processes for improvements. I see them out of the corner of my eye trying to decide whether or not to ‘disturb’ me, as if they could.
Two: I’m the methodology police. I’m the guy who comes in and says “See, you’re not actually testing anything. You have to test your code.” I’m the guy who says they have to have the bi-weekly meetings and this is the way to do them. Sure, I know FULL WELL that you really can’t impose process like that. So does everyone up the chain from me (mostly.) But the bloodbath of dragging people kicking and screaming to better work is abhorrent.
Now #1 is a blast as you might imagine. I love working and talking with people who are engaged. I don’t care if it’s about ink and paper. The irony of it is that people come to me for guidance and end up teaching me far more than I teach them and everybody goes away happy. Sure, fine with me. #2 is pretty repulsive. I’m a rather fundamentally uncontentious person. People who lust for conversational blood-baths simply have to take a long walk off a short pier. People who insist they’re doing things the one true right way… gak. I like this stuff because it works. It’s not easy to get used to, so grow up and give it an honest shot.
But all of that aside, I’m simply not DOING it. I’m teaching it.
For years I’ve simply not been able to talk about what I do with friends. There’s just no shared context. I mean how do you describe the madness of writing cross platform multiplexed c++ server code with the single obstacle being the fact that the third parameter to ‘accept’ is signed on one platform and unsigned on another. Nobody I know has the faintest idea what the fuck that means, nor should they.
So now, in addition to that, I no longer do any of this. I teach it.
My greatest professional skills are perfectly untapped instead of being ‘mostly’ untapped, per usual.
Here we go again.