Birth - scroll - work - dearth / We need a raised floor in order to hide the bodies.
I can't remember where I left the ramblings about the state of $work. I know I could go and look, because everything one puts on the internet is now remembered for us wholesale, either by people trying to sell things or by people trying to prove that someone or other is engaging in Thoughtcrime, but that would rather spoil the narrative flow that I already have in my head.
So you'll just have to put up with me pretending that it's 1993 and still having to remember things or look them up in books is a relevant skill.
Although. When I was being taught analogue electronics, which I have now largely and shamefully forgotten, the chap-in-charge was at pains to point out that remembering the formulae for building a band-pass filter or unity-gain op-amp circuit was a complete waste of time because all that stuff was in the reference books anyway, and a much more useful skill was knowing where to look for the answers.
Anyway. Anyone who's been working for some place that's in a bit of a turmoil will recognise the sequence of events that wobbles along the lines of this:
i) Something that passes for normal. You have enough time for coherent thinking, five or six mugs of tea/coffee per day and regular looks at $social-media while something is compiling or rebooting.
ii) Disturbance! Manglement assures all concerned that while changes are afoot, the change will be minimal and things will soon return to state (i).
iii) Dealing with disturbance! Hack, patch, put out fires! Time for three mugs of tea/coffee per day. A couple of late finishes/week where you do coherent thinking because it's quiet when everyone else has left.
iv) The CI/CD antipattern is called Continuous Interruption/Continuous Disturbance. You are approximating the work of three people. Nothing actually gets finished because you are interrupted more often than the twenty minutes it takes to actually get steam up when considering a problem. Leaving the office for lunch is a vague memory. An early finish is remarked upon by the security guards you are now on first-name terms with because you see them more often than the reception people who keep office hours.
v) You realise that this is now normal and look back upon state (iii) as the restful time when you could actually make progress.
vi) Take up smoking as an excuse for leaving the building regularly. (Not even slightly a joke. Not me, mind.)
vii) There is A Meeting! Project managers assure you that this situation is unsustainable and there will be Measures and you will not be disturbed!
viii) Interruptions are now prefaced with 'I know you're busy and I'm not supposed to bother you, but could you just..?'
ix) You realise that this is now normal and look back upon state (iv) as the restful time when you could actually make progress.
This is partly my/our own damn fault because no-one actually wants the Ops team to go back to being a mob of surly and unapproachable authoritarians who make petitioners fill in a pile of impossible job tickets before their request is considered. That never ends well. Actually it ends in shouting and recrimination because there's a passive-aggressive conveyor belt of Things that need Doing which will not stop and really doesn't care if anyone's picking up the Things before they fall off the end of the belt with the exciting sound of crockery disintegration.
... I think I'll stop there before it all gets a little too painful to think about.
So you'll just have to put up with me pretending that it's 1993 and still having to remember things or look them up in books is a relevant skill.
Although. When I was being taught analogue electronics, which I have now largely and shamefully forgotten, the chap-in-charge was at pains to point out that remembering the formulae for building a band-pass filter or unity-gain op-amp circuit was a complete waste of time because all that stuff was in the reference books anyway, and a much more useful skill was knowing where to look for the answers.
Anyway. Anyone who's been working for some place that's in a bit of a turmoil will recognise the sequence of events that wobbles along the lines of this:
i) Something that passes for normal. You have enough time for coherent thinking, five or six mugs of tea/coffee per day and regular looks at $social-media while something is compiling or rebooting.
ii) Disturbance! Manglement assures all concerned that while changes are afoot, the change will be minimal and things will soon return to state (i).
iii) Dealing with disturbance! Hack, patch, put out fires! Time for three mugs of tea/coffee per day. A couple of late finishes/week where you do coherent thinking because it's quiet when everyone else has left.
iv) The CI/CD antipattern is called Continuous Interruption/Continuous Disturbance. You are approximating the work of three people. Nothing actually gets finished because you are interrupted more often than the twenty minutes it takes to actually get steam up when considering a problem. Leaving the office for lunch is a vague memory. An early finish is remarked upon by the security guards you are now on first-name terms with because you see them more often than the reception people who keep office hours.
v) You realise that this is now normal and look back upon state (iii) as the restful time when you could actually make progress.
vi) Take up smoking as an excuse for leaving the building regularly. (Not even slightly a joke. Not me, mind.)
vii) There is A Meeting! Project managers assure you that this situation is unsustainable and there will be Measures and you will not be disturbed!
viii) Interruptions are now prefaced with 'I know you're busy and I'm not supposed to bother you, but could you just..?'
ix) You realise that this is now normal and look back upon state (iv) as the restful time when you could actually make progress.
This is partly my/our own damn fault because no-one actually wants the Ops team to go back to being a mob of surly and unapproachable authoritarians who make petitioners fill in a pile of impossible job tickets before their request is considered. That never ends well. Actually it ends in shouting and recrimination because there's a passive-aggressive conveyor belt of Things that need Doing which will not stop and really doesn't care if anyone's picking up the Things before they fall off the end of the belt with the exciting sound of crockery disintegration.
... I think I'll stop there before it all gets a little too painful to think about.