Current bosses are trying to get me to stay on another week after giving me the runaround on resignation paperwork after all the counteroffer talk, and I am annoyed!
I want my week off, damnit. Fully expect to have nothing still in the air after Friday, and that should be plenty good enough.
I hate PowerShell. Yeah, I know, it’s a wonderful tool that gives you direct command line control and automation power over a lot of functions, but it’s the least damned intuitive scripting language I’ve dealt with. Seems like every time I have to set something up I’m always starting at zero. No, I don’t have a point to that, just unloading I guess.
Yeah I hate powershell, too. I Google everything and then try to modify it to work in my environment. Bash is so much better.
The alternative is “getting paid to do nothing”, which is sometimes great!
Though saying that I once quit a job as I was literally doing nothing for days on end, not getting pulled up about it by the boss, and still out performing certain members of my team.
Man I"m the complete opposite. I love powershell and hate going back to Bash.
Yes it’s a bit verbose but writing scripts that deal with objects as output and not text output has made life so much easier, especially when I need to compose multiple scripts together. Every non-trivial bash script I’ve had to write has turned out extremely difficult to read and maintain. I’ve spun up a ton of Powershell scripting infrastructure for our development environments and it’s made life so much easier, even when working on our Linux servers.
I’m not that great with it so I feel your pain. I do have multiple coworkers who are wizards with it, however, so leaning on them for help when needed makes it tolerable. I’m very worried about the shift of DNS admin commands over to PowerShell because that means a ton of rework for me learning how to script adds/drops/changes going forward (we just migrated all AD servers to Server 2016 as part of a refresh.) At least a lot of people have already crossed that bridge and there are quite a few decent sites and write-ups for it on the internet.
I’ve been trying unsuccessfully to automate some things I do with Python. It’s not the fault of the language, it’s mostly mine for not dedicating enough time to it.
There is a dude in our Bangalore office trying to argue for a significant refactor of an open pull request that I have hanging out in git, which is a decent piece of the last ticket I’m trying to bring in for a hard landing before I walk out the door Friday evening (weeeellll possibly more like “afternoon”). I’ve already gone a few rounds with the lead engineers on it, and it’s in pretty good shape that everyone else is reasonably happy with.
I’m pretty much shrug emoji at this point. Like, you want to refactor it, be my guest, but not my problem friend-o.
I’m currently in India for 2 weeks working with our Indian engineers (which is all of our engineers except me and one other person). I kind of wish they were at the level to recommend refactors but usually it’s me having to tell them their approach needs to be thought over. Unfortunately I have also learned that I have to be really careful how I phrase things because if I suggest something it’s taken as gospel and people stay late (even if it was just an off the cuff remark).
The whole work culture here is interesting. There’s so little autonomy, but at least with our engineers we’ve at least shown that getting some good leaders and mentors in place really helps bring the level of quality up.
And the food is fantastic, except for the mass of bones in everything.
I have been wearing a lot of hats at work, especially in late Feb/early March, and I definitely brushed up against the “If I had to do this every day constantly for 24 months, I’d be dead” burnout. Can definitely sympathize by having just sort of glimpsed it without having to live it!
We’ve launched an element of our platform as SaaS and so busy directly correlates with “I still have a job” at least to a degree. :D Plus, from years of working in restaurant operations management I can tell you that at least for me, running an empty restaurant is MUCH tougher on my brain than running a busy one.
For what it’s worth, you can get used to a lot. After a sprint or three, suddenly that seems mundane. After a job with workdays that start when you get up and end when you finally go to bed, things outside of that seem like being paid for nothing.
I’ve been on both sides of that. Take care of yourself, man. Take time, even a day and get away enough from technology and … contact … that you can decompress. When at work and in the middle of it, go grab a fellow employee at least twice a day and sit down at a table, have tea and talk about anything but work. Schedule be damned and work backlog be damned.
It’s those points that make the rest of it doable. And good luck at the startup, Trig. That shit can be hell. There is light at the end of the tunnel, just make sure it’s not the burnout tunnel.
Thanks for this, it’s really helpful. Some aspects of this I’ve got experience with – managing a high end restaurant, Thanksgiving to Christmas each year is basically crunch x 1000 for that 5-6 weeks…but always in the short term, and not “let’s do that for 6 months to a year”.
But the other aspects – the uncertainty, the yo-yo emotions of euphoria from when there’s plenty of working capital to “easy now” are taking some adjustment.
By far the biggest adjustment is that I have the most interaction with our other offices on the West Coast. I’m on the East coast. Which means that there are a lot of days where it’s 5-6pm and “Here’s some stuff we need done ASAP” happens. Not their fault; they’re handing that over in the middle of the afternoon, their time. But there have bee a few times when I’ve had to adjust plans as a result, or sat and worked on something well into the evening, albeit with some hockey or football game going on in the background.
Everyone handles that part a little differently. For me I’m really good at compartmentalizing it and forgetting about it until I’m sitting alone at my house later on and the anxiety hits me hard. A paycheck is a paycheck. No amount of pay is worth dealing with anxiety long term. But that being said, it’s more and more of the same. Hopefully that eases off some.
I call this the East Coast Burden. I know every employee gets to bitch and gripe about whatever affects them but this hits me hard as well. When I roll into the office in the morning, EMEA has been up and has a list of crap that they build up until we’re online. As I get to afternoon, west coast is fired up because it’s morning work issues, and here we are in “lunch coma.” And when I go home and just finish up with dinner. APAC is online and pinging me, “just to take a look at something.” Don’t get me wrong, I’m part of a team and that team spans about 20 hours of coverage a day. But I’m the senior on the team which means I feel like I’m constantly needed to take the burden of things that land on me because the junior team members can’t do everything. It sucks.
It makes me want to move to some ungodly time zone where I can annoy the crap out of everyone else.
God, reading that makes me thankful that I’m working in Mountain Time and also that our business only spans North America.
Oh I feel that too. I’m in PST, but work closely with teams in Asia and Europe. Any time China has an issue is an 8pm call. And when I’m back in Chicago then it’s worse.
I mentioned in another thread about coming home Wed night and taking a nitroglycerin pill for the first time due to chest pain from work-related stress.
What happened on Wed is that the head of finance sent a nasty email to me, my boss, and the chief of staff putting me on full blast for not having this year’s CCB-approved list of purchases done already, because the FY will end in just a few weeks (it ends Sept). I then find out my boss was in the room with him while he was typing the email. I run 9 separate domains, the sole FSA, over 20 servers (DCs, exchange, SQL, Lync, RHEL, Sharepoint, etc), over 1k users, over 20 off-sites, I have 2 phones on my desk that ring all day long, and the email blasted me for not having purchases done (which itself is a complete bureaucratic PITA dealing with govt contract regs poorly understood by GS-9s new to govt service who work the purchases), a duty dumped on me when the previous unreplaced IT team lead left for a better job (within three months of leaving he no longer needed his blood pressure meds).
What pushed me over the edge was my boss telling me he was present when the email was being drafted. I asked if he explained the staffing situation and got a “oh, they know we’re busy.” A separate IT team lead had a nervous breakdown from the job last fall, months before my heart issues put me in the hospital in Dec. One of the advantages of silly service is oodles of leave time, so I’ve been off yesterday and today and there’s not a damn thing they can do about it but bitch and complain.
When you work with a global team, it happens in all directions. When I was working from Istanbul, the contractors in India wanted me to come in early, and the teams in NA needed me to stay late. Expertise is always in demand, and I never learned to delegate or mentor as well as I should have.
Being a global lead on the West Coast means my mornings are EMEA and my afternoons/evenings are APAC with regular day-to-day work in-between.
Yup. And our WHQ is local, which means the bulk of the teams are local, which means that I get about as much volume as the other two shifts combined normally.
In practical terms my groups, which handles about 1600 tickets a month, has about 17 people. I personally handle over 200 tickets a month. I’ve regularly had double the workload of anyone else on the team.
But in the anti spirit of the thread, I have this story from Wednesday.
So I had an issue come in that had come up before, actually weeks before my team took over from the previous vendor. The previous team had ‘fixed’ the issue superficially. But not the underlying cause.
Anyhow it was a complex technical issue that I spent several days, and about a dozen hours looking into it and multiple calls with client, discovered the root issue, which had been missed, and communicated to all teams. The project manager for the APLA group messaged me to say that I’ve been the best person he’s worked with supporting the systems in 7 years, and that I could screenshot and send to my boss.
So I did.
Well two days later and it has been forwarded not just to the Client management as well as my company’s management team for this client, but to the head for North America for my group. And then to the global head of my entire division.
My company has 360k employees, my division has some 15k employees globally. And now I’m being flagged all the way to him.
Pretty damn good day really.
Man, cherish these times. That’s awesome, Craig.
Yup, which is why I realize its the same for every employee bitching. And trust me I’m just as guilty, today as an example, of walking out the door at 5PM and throwing this stuff to someone on-call. If only we could turn back time to the point when global coverage wasn’t a thing. Things were handled with more staff, in local region.
Here’s to Friday afternoon (once you’re there.)
Gotta love the smell of rain on a fresh Go-Live morning, well mini Go-Live, just our team but hey still one. We’re about to flip the “switch.”