A new era
THE HISTORY:
When I first started with my group, I owned testing for the R200 (a prototype driver for WDDM). This was very low priority, and did not get much attention. But it was a way for me to learn some of the basics of our work environment.
About 2 months later, my new responsibility became complete ownership of an *entire* Driver Model - XDDM (XP Display Driver Model, or all graphics cards manufactured within about a 4 year period). Problems were technically low profile, with some exceptions ... but should have been high profile. This was balanced out by business reasons.
During the course of XDDM ownership, it was my responsibility to determine how to take such a massive area, and cover it sufficiently with as few resources as possible. Then, to work on transitioning it to the SE team ... the earliest in Windows history. (this was a moderate "success" at best).
Somewhere in here I also temporarily took on ownership of Customer Bug triage, when we were short a PM.
After transition, it became my job to verify Core Graphics Infrastructure for the LDA (Linked Display Adapter) feature set. Basically, the newest technology - when two physical cards render/process as one logical unit. We knew we wouldnt ship drivers with this enabled, but we still needed to make sure our part was good for when NVidia and ATI finally publicly released an LDA Capable driver.
Then I had to transition this to respective IHV owners on my team.
So basically, up to that point, I was the filler guy. The one man wandering task force. I would get ownership of things that fit the "Oh fuck, we have a coverage hole" category. It was my job to come in, learn an area quickly, figure out how fucked we were, report on the level of fuckedness, make as good a plan as possible (as quickly as possible), and move on.
Just this past January, it became my responsibility to own testing for Intel WDDM. This ask was definitely higher profile. Definitely less of a coverage hole. And it required me again, to own the driver and execution of the testing - something I am about the only one on the team doing (everyone else has Temps performing the execution).
THE POWERPLAY:
Throughout all of this, my main piece of feedback to my manager has been "You need to take me off of execution". Personally, I liken test execution to the intellectual equivalent of sweeping floors. Its brainless, retarded, busywork. This is the stuff you give to Temps.
Originally, I would put comments about this once a month in my status mails. But as soon as I took over intel (and some reorging happened), I started bringing this fact up once a week. This culminated 2 weeks ago in a meeting.
ME: "Okay, well how honest do you want me to be?"
THEM: "Completely. We can take it."
ME: "Okay. As it stands, on regular weeks I can completely handle Intel. On messed up weeks like last week, no way. Honestly, you should hire a Temp to take over execution. It really isnt worth my time or our money for me to do it. I believe that I can do much better things for our team with the extra time I would have if I didnt perform execution."
THEM: "Wow. Thats pretty brutal honesty there."
ME: "You asked for it."
ME: "Now Dave, I ask you ... can you handle ATI and NVidia Mobiles by yourself? Yes? Okay, then I would like to propose an idea. The goal is to mitigate context switching, a particularly difficult problem with Temps, and to maximize useage of personal resources. So we hire a temp. They perform Intel execution completely - which takes desktop execution off my hands and mobile execution off yours."
MY BOSS: "I like that. A lot!"
THE RESULTS:
Last friday, I heard the prelimary results of my powerplay. And tomorrow starts the actualization of those results.
Starting tomorrow, I will begin ramping up to own all of the tools for our team. This means all of the reporting tools that our tools guy developed (rough guestimate of about 10-20k lines of code). This also includes all of the helper tools.
And in a ninja fashion - this also includes handoff to the Windows Tools Team (because our tools are apparently filling gaps that a lot of other teams are just now realizing they need tools to fill).
Which means, I will probably be coding again. For the first time in like forever. And which also means, that unless I fuck it up ... they kinda have to promote me soon, or I will have a large, legitimate beef.
The only odd thing, is that I will still the Intel Driver, at a high level. Which means, if they convert that position over to PM (which it rightfully should be), then I will be a PM/SDET. Or somesuch.
Kinda exciting. And kinda nervewracking. Hopefully, I will feel much more fulfilled with this position. Cause hot damn ... test execution makes me want to gouge out my fucking eyeballs, slowly ... with a soft rubber eraser.