The Work Week in Review

[davidschroth]

Early in the week my boss informed me that our mutual boss had decided that the code I was working on needed to go into the very next release. Since the date for integrating features into this release was past (long past), this would be a bit of a challenge. The stuff I've been working has not had a design review, let alone a code review. We would be taking drastic shortcuts with our process (actually, as near as I can tell, we would not be doing a number of required process steps. For some steps, this is no big loss. For others...)

So I've spent the week get the design documents ready for design review, and the code ready for code review, and copies of the code into the hands of the testers so that they can test the code before it gets jammed into the Operating System and officially released for test.

The shortcuts we're taking are normally a recipe for disaster. I hope we can avoid that.

In other news, one of our customers is planning to upgrade their software to the latest released level. Usually, this customer has me on site whenever they do a major hardware upgrade. I think it's because I act as a sort of good luck charm for them. When I'm on site, potential disasters seem to turn into minor annoyances. Anyway, the rumor is that they'd like to have me on site when they do the upgrade at the end of the month. Which probably will have some impact on other plans I'd had (like World Fantasy Convention).

Comments

[webbob.livejournal.com]

I hope that you can find ways to be happy in your current job as the stress of your marriage lessens. Probably you should ask for a month off to go to Australia, or something, maybe in a couple of years. Or a bonus (maybe just in time off) for any time a big customer uses you as a good luck charm.

I mean, customers love you, you've reported here that you're good at fixing bugs in customers' mission-critical systems, you get away with saying rude shit in meetings, and are clearly as close to indipsensable as any corporation can consider any employee to be. If you can learn to negotiate without ultimata (and it's sometimes really hard to do that), you can probably get more reward for your labours.

If you should happen to start a family, seriously consider asking for more money and more time off. If your manager has more than a dozen neurons in its brain, encouraging developments in your life that will make you stable and settled will seem like a very good idea.

[serendipoz.livejournal.com]

I for one would miss you at WFC. Maybe you can convince them the next week is better, ...

[davidschroth.livejournal.com]

I'm actually pretty happy with my work (and have been for as long as I've been doing it), and reasonably happy with the job.

Past experience with Unisys makes it pretty clear that no one is indispensable.

I'll admit to being reasonably well paid (much better paid than I ever expected would be the case) - I see my financial problems as stemming from my attempts to keep our financial boat afloat while P was busy punching holes in the bottom of the boat...

My dissatisfaction with the raise I received was because I perceived it as a way of saying that my contribution to the financial health of the company was not as important as the rules the HR people have put into place about the size of people's raises...

Most of my whining is probably an attempt to forestall a visit from St. Murphy. Our processes were originally developed by the people doing the work, and were set up to try to catch errors early in the cycle and minimize rework. Which they pretty well do. But there's a set of people I work with who always complain about how "cumbersome" the process is, and want to "streamline" the process. These complainers are typically the people who always take shortcuts. The rest of us spend a fair amount of time and effort cleaning up the hash they make when they do shortcut the process. Being ordered to take shortcuts gives me an uneasy feeling.