A Good Imagination and a Pile of Junk

Godspeed DJ Snooze.

I…

yeah.

wow.

So… it’s August.

The ambient temperature in my apartment is under 60 degrees.

#win

I might actually sleep a full night for the first time in six months.

Or maybe it hasn’t been the weather.

Believe it or not, I actually don’t have my Mother’s phone number.

This is a particular bitch because today is her birthday.

So, love me or hate me, it’s totally her awesome fault.

<3 Mom

“Look at this flower” and “Numismatic Compendium” For the win :-)

I loled

Hard.

(hat tip to Ted)

I repeat…

We have noodle.

That is all.

We have what you’d call a “knowledge silo issue.” There’s a major portion of our long-standing application that has no knowledge representation in the development team. There’s literally nobody who knows how it works or how to use it. It’s an important piece of functionality.

HOWEVER, the “operations” team has one person who has been up to her eyeballs in this application for years. Just her, that’s all. Now, you’d think that ‘operations’ did… ‘operations’, and they do. But they (or, rather, she) does all the development and support of this application. If she got hit by a bus, there would be 3-6 months of nightmare as all usual business was put on hold while we tried to investigate and come up to speed.

Fortunately, it’s not just the ground troops who are aware that this is a problem.

The first thing I worked on when I joined this team was a development project related to that set of applications (unfortunately I have to be intentionally vague, so I’m not sued into a damn work house for the remainder of my brief existence on this little blue dot.)

I was able to sit with her for a bit to pick up some background information and off I went to make a first cut at my task.

Occasionally I’d send her a snippet of code as a design example and ask if it made sense. Her response was usually to stare at me blankly, shrug her shoulders and say “I guess so.” Guesses about what that did to my head are an exercise left to the reader.

That first project of mine had faded in to obscurity, not because it went out the door, but because when it came time to actually test the code, my “mentor” was chronically unavailable. Production problems, other responsibilities. The test environment was being used, they’re migrating the code. Excuses excuses excuses. Finally we stopped pushing.

Now fast forward nearly six months, to about 2 weeks ago. The business side is turning up the heat a bit on that project. “Well, she’s busy.”

So we schedule a series of training sessions, two hours a day, three days in a row. We invite her, her backup on the operations team, me, my backup on this team, and the analysts.

An hour before the meeting starts on Wednesday “Oh, she’s not going to be able to join us. She’s really busy.” I give our analyst a glare that burns a hole in his forehead. He calls our boss, who calls her boss, who says “she’s busy.” So our boss calls her bosses boss, who calls her boss, who says “she’s busy.”

So we have the first session. The guy who works as her backup comes over and says “look, I don’t know what I can tell you, she’s the one who knows.”

I jump in “that’s fine. Tell you what, why don’t you take us through what you can, so that when we do get her time, at least we won’t be asking her stupid questions.” He’s a nice guy, but what he’s learned he’s learned via osmosis, sitting next to her.

He nods and we all sit around my desk and go through an introductory powerpoint presentation that we’ve all been deeply familiar with slide by slide, for about 45 minutes. We sit around and “bs” a bit afterwards and he mentions a couple other documentation sources on the intranet, a Lotus Notes database they use, etc.

There was a lot of “as I said, I don’t know what I can do for you. She’s the only one who knows all that Level 3 support stuff.”

“No no, that’s fine. This is pretty helpful, I appreciate it.”

“And I’ll send you a link to that Notes database.” A Lotus Notes database is (ostensibly, in this case) a collection of embedded documents, freeform database information and such.

“Excellent, thanks man.”

He leaves. 10 minutes later I get an email with an attachment.

“Sorry, the link to the notes database wouldn’t send so I’ve got this.”

The attachment is a word document, which I opened to find nine screen shots that he took of pages in the notes database.

I try really hard here to keep the tech talk out of it. But it’s tough to describe how… irrelevant, superfluous, just plain stupid that was. It’s like saying “well, I couldn’t fit the book in the envelope to send to you, so here’s a picture of the table of contents, cheers!”

I actually had a “good god, who DOES THAT!?!” outburst.

I turned to our analyst (who sort of shephards all this, since he’s the business side contact) and said “We need her. This can’t go on. If we have to delay it, then we do. But there’s no reason to continue these things.” He agreed to talk to our bosses boss the next time she was in (our direct manager is on vacation this week and left strict orders that these meetings need to happen.)

Turn to Thursday. I get a meeting reminder and twitch. Again, I swiveled my chair around and looked at our analyst.

“Is she joining us today?”
“No.”
“Then… ok, here. Every. Single. Attendee of this meeting knows that they are absolutely useless, completely and perfectly without value right?”
“Right.”
“Then I submit to you that if we have this meeting, we are a bunch of morons. And if you want me to walk in to the director’s office and present that argument, I’d be happy to. I’m in that kind of mood.”
“Well, if..but… *phew*” I can see him sweating it out. Finally he comes up with “Ok, but we’re going to have more people today, right?”
“I don’t know, are we?”
“Yeah, their boss and a couple other people wanted to dial in. So, ya know if you feel you’re not going to get anything out of it and just want to skip it…” He won’t actually say it’s ok out loud, as that would imply a blessing for my absence. It’s cute to watch people move between rocks and hard places.

So I put the headset on and dial in to the conference call on mute. Sure enough, it’s the same guy giving PRECISELY THE SAME presentation he gave the day before, which I know everybody on the call had already heard two months earlier, because we were all in the same call.

As he wraps up, 46 minutes later, just like the previous day, everybody compliments him on what a wonderful training session it was and how much they learned.

I’m rocking back and forth in my chair, bleeding from my ears, looking like I’m choking on a baseball sized lump of pure distilled rage.

I.. I don’t know what to do here. I feel like I’m insane, and there is NO shortage of people who’ll chime RIGHT in with that. But surely, SURELY these people are aware of how ludicrous this all is, right?

I mean, is this all really just a cargo cult of software development? Children play acting at what they think running a development arm of a financial institution is like?

I’d interview, but I’ve only been here for six months and, when asked why I’m leaving I don’t know that I could stop myself from saying that I was sick of working for a shop that subscribed to the “infinite monkeys” school of software development.

Please. If you’ve got anything, I’m all ears.

Seriously. I can see “dude, prozac” actually being the right advice.

“It’s not you, it’s me.” or…something.

I’m getting tired of a lot of things. I’m getting tired of thinking I’m doing the right thing by hocking my soul to people who don’t treat me right under the guise of ‘doing the right thing’.

I fight a constant battle with selfishness and solitude; an elitism of sorts. But I over-react in the wrong direction as a misguided attempt to compensate.

I won’t be treated the way I’ve been treated. I would never do it to anybody else. Ever. And I won’t have it done to me.

I won’t be accused of being insensitive by the insensitive, cruel by the cruel, or absent by the absent.

Look to your own house before you criticize me.

And I’ll look to mine before I criticize you.

Hopefully we’ll meet on the other side.

THAT said, I have near infinite patience for people who are open and honest.