Month: September 2017

I have to listen to Bjork to calm down; I have to drink some beer to calm my rage; I have to just close my eyes and picture a forest or I’ll freak.

I’m livid. I’m beyond consolable. I had a bad day at work in what seems to be a string of many bad days. And it was just one thing too. Just one email at the end of the day set me off.

 

Here’s the setup: I’m in a monitoring team, tasked with providing monitoring systems & solutions. Here’s the rub: Nobody gives a fuck. What set me off was a major outage, one that had apparently been happening for two days. And it’s not the outage in and of itself that’s got me. It’s the aftermath, or rather lack there of.

So I’m here, in a monitoring team and I’m getting no requests to monitor systems. I don’t hear a word about that outage from anyone.  Not word one.  The email is a blast to about half the company, so I’m just another name in a distribution. Another email destination that may as well be /dev/null.

 

If there’s a postmortem it’s basically meaningless because they’re not giving me tasks so that when this happens again (not if, when) we can catch it early.  If there’s a postmortem we’re not even involved.

Because, hey, why would you involve the monitoring team when outages occur?

 

Couple that with the fact they’re vendoring off a large chunk of monitoring to some other company and I have the stark realization that my job is pointless. I’m undervalued, or not at all.  The work I do provides no meaningful value to the organization.  My team is either ignored or largely forgotten.

 

And so what do I do?  Start a blog on the companies wiki about the new features we’re delivering.   Attend CoPs and try to talk to people face to face. Scream at a wall.

 

Earlier this week we got a notification that someone is taking over the lab environments. They’ve been unstable lately so he suggests he (or his team more appropriately) is going to improve the monitoring of the environment. OK, cool! I’m all for that. So I reply with

​”Hello, I’m on the monitoring team [because clearly you don’t know one exists]. How can we help? [because I’ve spent the last year tooling this environment and Jesus fucking Christ if I don’t see the writing on the wall that you’re just going to go off on your own and spend the next year doing the same thing]”

What do I get in return?  A bunch of ++ leadership and then radio silence.

 

And I get it, that some of this is on me. That a blog is not enough. That showing up to CoPs is not enough.  I don’t know what is. It’s not like I’m new to the company, I’ve worked there for years. I know the people in leadership on down.

 

But I have to wonder how a war room can exists for weeks on end, triaging issues and outages and never flow feature requests back to us. They know we exist, I know that. So why is the case that I never hear from them?

I wonder a lot about corporate culture. How leadership, myself and the people around me create and modify it.  There’s nothing rewarding about silence. It doesn’t make me appreciate my position. I only grow discontented because these things are happening around me that I can’t control. There are outages but all I get is an email blast that four thousand other people got.  There are issues but all I hear about them is what I can glean from an elevator conversation; one that doesn’t involve me.

 

What I know is this:

• Vendoring work that damn well should be mine tells me that my job, and me by extension, holds little value.
• When people at the tippy top of leadership don’t even know my team exists tells me that all the work we’ve done has been for naught.
• That I’m tired. And frustrated. And I feel like shit because no matter what I do or how hard I work, the things that I create ultimately get used by other people. And there’s some colossal disconnect between us.