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How to feel when you know you’re job is pointless.

jeffohrstrom

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Optimism in corporate culture; and why I don’t have it.

jeffohrstrom

The past, the present and the future. The good, the bad and the ugly. Perhaps not in that order, but it’s funny how we as humans break things up into threes.

People always seem to be optimistic about our collective corporate future. I wonder why that is because we can be so pessimistic about our present.  I know why leadership is. That’s clear; they’re like politicians, they have to piss on your leg and tell you it’s raining. But our corporate overlords aside, I wonder why we, the proletariats of the corporate ladder are.

Do we have any real cause to be? No. I realized the simple truth that actions do speak louder than words recently. It’s like you know a thing, because you can regurgitate it. But somehow you don’t because it’s not a part of you. That truth is now a part of me.

But we see things things go on for years. We’re cynical about everyday problems we see at work but when leadership says “yea, we’re changing that” we clap and dream about the future.  We dream knowing what the past, and present for that matter, contradicts those hopes.

That’s not to say things can’t change. They absolutely can. My point is only that things should be taken with some amount of skepticism and not wholly believed on face value.  This applies in general to be sure, but specifically as it relates to corporate leadership.

 

I started this entry while waiting for our fearless leaders at a monthly all hands meeting at work. In that meeting, they said something that upon later reflection really fucking infuriated me. It was this; One of our big pushes in the future is ABC.  Now I redact whatever that feature is, because (a) it really is inconsequential for the overall discussion here and (b) although nobody at work reads these blogs (that I know of) they could and they could get pissed about me blabbing about what our corporate strategy is.

[A moment of reflection while I write this]

I’m worried about giving out corporate strategy but I’m completely OK implying that leadership are inherently liars?  Strange. I suppose the latter are my feelings which I feel justified in having. The former is a real corporate initiative which I probably have some NDA about.

It’s also not that interesting. It’s the principle, not the actual feature, that I want to talk about.

 

So, back to the new super cool, money making, life altering initiative ABC.  Why’s it so infuriating?

We had it. I was in a group that did it. 

It got disbanded when the powers that be decided to vendor it and now all of the sudden a year and a half later they fucking see the writing on the wall and want it?  My manager saw the writing on the wall and left. My director saw the writing on the wall and he too left.

I didn’t and I stayed. Because although I knew the phrase about actions and words, I didn’t know it in my heart.

 

Well, by golly, I do now.  I’m trying hard not to be outright cynical. But I feel like cynicism comes from reality.  And optimism, conversely, comes from hopes and dreams.  Which is not to say that optimism isn’t valid or even plain necessary. It is for sure.

I’m just trying to balance the two.

Have optimism where I can justify its existence; and always be trying to justify it.  

It’s not always going to work out. But I’m always on the hunt for it.  Or I want to be,  in any case.

 

Im going to work at a sofware company when I grow up

jeffohrstrom

Today at work I had a chance to see yet another vendors demo. This time is monitoring hooks deep down inside the JVM. Last week is was monitoring streaming channels.

Why do large companies jump so quickly to buy vendor products? Why doesn’t anyone want to  build anything?

When I grow up, I’m going to work at a real software company where we really build things. At this rate, what I’m actually going to be doing is integrating vendor products and training offshore contractors how to administrate them. What im actually doing is managing instead of engineering.

Thank Christ for GitHub. 2-3 hours a day at home I can be an engineer. I have no vendors. I have no horseshit requirement document to bicker over. No schedule. No short sighted arguments about constraints. Just beer and code, god bless ’em.

Then over the weekend it’s even better. I can get to work.  I can keep busy and actually do something. All the while, stewing over all the bullshit at work which just hardens my resolve do get this project going, my project going.

 

What I wonder is why. Why do companies vendor out things over and over. For years, they pay other people to do the work their own engineers should be doing. And I get the argument that somethings are far to complex to try to build out. Building switches is not something that sustainable. Or encoding algorithms. But even things like JIRA, there are open source alternatives.

And so, OK, if you have the money buy some JIRA licenses, I’m fine with that. But when you have a culture of vendoring out products you’re saying to your employees is:

Your not worth investing in.  I’m not interested in what you can do or provide. I’d rather just pay someone else for it and let you deal with the fallout.

Which there will be fallout. There always is. There’s always some major feature that wasn’t described in the initial statement of work (SOW) that maybe seemed implicit at the time or was just plain forgotten altogether. But now that it’s delivered it doesn’t have it or integrates with things poorly.  And now what? You’re filling out more SOWs and paying them again for what they should have built in the first place!

Vendor products just don’t tend to be sustainable. You rely too heavily on their support and so you don’t invest in people who can run and manage the system. When something breaks you’re at their mercy to fix it and you pray that the outage isn’t widespread or doesn’t push out testing/integration deadlines too far while it’s triaged.  You’re at the mercy of their development cycles and when they’ll deliver.

 

Today is now Sunday and I’m updating my resume. I will work at a real software company. It’s not some pie in the sky dream, it’s real, it has to be. That’s the only way out. I can’t wait for culture to change here. I can’t keep believing in leaderships’ lies about how good the future will be.

I need to break the cycle.  I have to. For my own health if nothing else. There are only three ways this ends. (1) I die at my desk over a heart failure or some other stress related catastrophic organ failure. (2) I give up and just phone it in for the rest of my tenure. Or (3) I move on.

Options one and two are the same to me; drowning is the same as treading water. Three is the only real option I have.  So I’m going to take it. Not today, and not even this week. But one day, one fine day, I will work at a real software company.

 

 

 

 

 

I don’t need the change the world

jeffohrstrom

I don’t need to change the world. I’d settle for just changing myself. That thought popped into my head today, and though I don’t fully know what it means, I feel it.

I guess I’ve been sour lately. Out of sorts, but I don’t know if I’d ever been in sorts. Maybe I’ve always been and I’m simply just realizing it.

This is all just dribble. Modern day, privileged, middle class horse shit.  I have too many things. I don’t know where I’m going. I’m not doing anything.  There are no more frontiers. I’m not afraid of anything anymore. And I’m angry at things I can’t define.

I’m just bored. And tired.

I have no next thing. I’ve never had good future planning skills. I moved out to LA a bright eyed idiot from small town. And it was amazing. It was new and fresh, it was my first real job, and the real start of my adult life.

Then somewhere in there, it wasn’t the start anymore. I grew into myself and … I don’t know how to finish that sentence. I know there’s an and in there, I just don’t know what comes next. And I guess that’s the problem.

I’m tired of watching TV. Let me rephrase; I’m tired of being OK with watching so much TV.  I’m tired of being content with watching other people’s stories and not really putting the time into my own.  As I type I’m watching Cops, and loving it. I’m much more interested in a moment in someone else’s life from 20 years ago than my own.

 

I hate to sound so melodramatic. So cliche. In some ways that’s the worst of it. Knowing that this feeling is so completely ubiquitous in our culture. That isolation, ironically, is widespread.

A list of things I aught to do;

  • Quit my job
  • Get a girlfriend
  • Move
  • Take a vacation
  • Finish this list

 

 

A few days later…

It’s nothing short of amazing what a weekend, mind altering substances, finding some new music and making progress on a personal project (or probably anything) will do to your general outlook on life.

Do I feel the same way? Probably, but much less so; I just can’t sustain such gloomy feelings. And for that I have to be thankful.

But now is Sunday evening and so it’s natural to feel good. Work is stressful. Not work in and of itself, but certainly work in an environment that you can’t completely control is; or at least can be, but also is for me.

 

And so I’m going to start another week. Wax and wane between happiness and despair. Cynicism in the corporate structure and faith in myself and my team.  I suppose that’s life; and yet, I also suppose it doesn’t have to be.

A list of things I need to keep reminding myself of:

  • Nothing is forever, even bad shit
  • My github needs to be my escape
  • Spotify exists, and that’s awesome because by extension, there is new music out there.
  • While changing the world may be out of reach, changing myself is most certainly not.

 

 

 

Other people

jeffohrstrom

It’s funny how other people push us to do things. Man, that’s been on my tongue for a long time. I guess it’s been a common theme for me for the past couple of weeks.

Recently someone commented on an issue on a repository of mine wondering when that particular feature would be done. My reply: Tonight’s the night! That repository had been, and probably is still, for the most part dead. I just never got a real chance to use it myself.

I thought it was a good idea, and I still do to be sure; but the idea never took at work so… I work on other, shiner, things instead.  But, someone updated the issue, someone wanted something from me. So, I’m on it.

That entire code base is likely sit and rot until someone else comes along and pushes me to do something more with it.  I don’t use it, so I don’t work on it. But by golly, if someone wants something more out of it; I’m all over it.

I like to help people.  I don’t know why, I’m just an idiot like that.  Here’s a simple example:

Someone at work: I have a problem that's cursorily involved 
in what you do.
Me: Ughhhhh, Yes please!

There’s a darker side to this phenomenon though; there always is.  In the former case it’s “Oh sure I’d love to help you/do that/show you who I am!”  In the latter it’s “Fuck you, I’ll show you who I am!”

I get a lot of that too.  There’s a Jessica Alba commercial that’s been running for a while that has that same sentiment in it. Naysayers I keep proving wrong, etc. And also buy my water. And though I find the commercial phony and over played, I still relate to it.  I still find myself trying to prove my own naysayers wrong.

 

I don’t like carrying that with me. I like to think oh I’m smart, I’m capable. I like to think things like that can’t affect me. Other people’s bullshit is just that, other people’s.

But what’s there to be done? I’m not zen enough to let it go. Dust your shoulders off.

Of course the feelgood answer would be make something positive out of the negative. Intent matters here though.

People make you do things. They force you to become who you are, who you want to be. I didn’t expect to be peer pressured at 30, yet here I am. The upside is my peers have changed and the things they’re making me do is actually positive.

Even so, the downside is I can’t just be. I still measure myself by others.  I still envy.

 

What’s to be done? I don’t know, but if I find out; I’ll remember to write it down.