What's currently wrong at work.
Some of this is universal. A lot of it, however, is simply that the way things are done at the current workplace is massively incompatible with my own psychological preferences.
My career and approach to date have been heavily IT-based. This has reinforced my own innate preferences for tools, processes, and policies which:
- produce useful results
- produce correct results
- work efficiently
- are elegant
- are thought through
- reduce manual effort
- bring the workload or effort as close as possible to the person wanting it done
- increase capacity
- increase flexibility
- remove restrictions and blocks on getting work done
- will continue to be relevant or compatible as long as possible
My current tasks, over the last few days, have been:
1) Learn the details of a badly-assembled, half-assed, half-unused, badly-labelled mess of a database structure which not only holds data which is often incorrect and will not BE corrected because of corporate politics, but which is scheduled to be replaced. I need to learn this in order to build unsupported ad-hoc SQL scripts which will be constructed and run manually by myself on request from random internal and external sources, because the internal tools and external website which are supposed to already cater to such requests are broken and not being fixed because of more politics. I also need to learn it because no-one in IT at all either knows it or wants to learn it, and there is only one other person in the entire organisation who does - and they're off sick half the time. Given the size, unintuitive structure and labels, and lack of training tools or information about it, it will be replaced well before I have actually learned it - or even most of it.
2) Assess testing scripts for the replacement database web interface. These scripts, which should have been put together by the external contractors hired to write the new DB framework and interface, have instead been assembled - badly - by internal people who have no idea how to test an interface or a database. By the time these tests get to my team, which is theoretically NOT part of the IT infrastructure, they should be at least in-principle perfect, and only being double-checked by us to make sure the writers didn't gloss over anything. We should be seeing a few hundred tests, maximum, with a 1% failure rate at most. Instead, we're seeing multiple hundred PAGES of scripts with failure rates anything up to 87%, which test sweet-F-A about the actual new software. And which, on being reported, are dismissed with the implication that everyone who uses it for the next ten years will just have to work around its failures.
3) Write twenty pages of self-assessment against supplied criteria in order to get my upcoming pay increment. The criteria have little, if anything, to do with my actual job. I've been given copies of what other people in my area wrote last year, but hardly any of it is relevant to what I do. The last time the guy who was doing this job bothered to write one up, it was so long ago that all the criteria have changed. I have to make stuff up in hundreds of locations, and then go and sit in an office with a manager for several hours going over it with a red pen, before rewriting it all again - and possibly a third and fourth time. This is an annual process everyone has to do - in an organisation of less than two hundred people.
4) Generate statistics on demand using the Kafkaesque database filled with incorrect data. The people who request the statistics are often the bigwigs who should be putting pressure on the teams entering wrong data to get it right. Instead, they blame us for not being able to provide pinpoint-accurate stats.
On top of this, the organisation is one which was set up many years ago by the government of the day, purely to win votes (or at least avoid losing them too badly). Our job is to (badly) administer a grudging, barrel-bottom-scraping once-off handout to a particular demographic in such a way as to either avoid them asking for it at all because of the red tape and endless legal dragging-out, or make the result as minimal and hard-won as possible. Or at least, that's the way we seem to be run.
No government then or since has liked our existence. Our HQ has been put at the point in the country furthest away from our capital. Our funding has been cut over and over again. Anyone with any career ambitions looks elsewhere. We fill up with the incompetent, the pitiful, temps, and people who have no other choice. We choke and drown in our own red tape. And looking at the yearly stats, the demand for our 'service' peaked years ago and the way it's tailing off, we'll have no business at all by 2015.
Given all of this, walking into work each morning is like slipping into a warm, reeking sewer of bad practice and infighting. I've analysed the problems all the way up the line, and the only way to fix them (after seeing how they're all intertwined) is to either replace the people at the top with someone actually competent who will authorise the necessary changes, or simply burn the place to the ground and beat the flames out with sledgehammers, then start over.
My career and approach to date have been heavily IT-based. This has reinforced my own innate preferences for tools, processes, and policies which:
- produce useful results
- produce correct results
- work efficiently
- are elegant
- are thought through
- reduce manual effort
- bring the workload or effort as close as possible to the person wanting it done
- increase capacity
- increase flexibility
- remove restrictions and blocks on getting work done
- will continue to be relevant or compatible as long as possible
My current tasks, over the last few days, have been:
1) Learn the details of a badly-assembled, half-assed, half-unused, badly-labelled mess of a database structure which not only holds data which is often incorrect and will not BE corrected because of corporate politics, but which is scheduled to be replaced. I need to learn this in order to build unsupported ad-hoc SQL scripts which will be constructed and run manually by myself on request from random internal and external sources, because the internal tools and external website which are supposed to already cater to such requests are broken and not being fixed because of more politics. I also need to learn it because no-one in IT at all either knows it or wants to learn it, and there is only one other person in the entire organisation who does - and they're off sick half the time. Given the size, unintuitive structure and labels, and lack of training tools or information about it, it will be replaced well before I have actually learned it - or even most of it.
2) Assess testing scripts for the replacement database web interface. These scripts, which should have been put together by the external contractors hired to write the new DB framework and interface, have instead been assembled - badly - by internal people who have no idea how to test an interface or a database. By the time these tests get to my team, which is theoretically NOT part of the IT infrastructure, they should be at least in-principle perfect, and only being double-checked by us to make sure the writers didn't gloss over anything. We should be seeing a few hundred tests, maximum, with a 1% failure rate at most. Instead, we're seeing multiple hundred PAGES of scripts with failure rates anything up to 87%, which test sweet-F-A about the actual new software. And which, on being reported, are dismissed with the implication that everyone who uses it for the next ten years will just have to work around its failures.
3) Write twenty pages of self-assessment against supplied criteria in order to get my upcoming pay increment. The criteria have little, if anything, to do with my actual job. I've been given copies of what other people in my area wrote last year, but hardly any of it is relevant to what I do. The last time the guy who was doing this job bothered to write one up, it was so long ago that all the criteria have changed. I have to make stuff up in hundreds of locations, and then go and sit in an office with a manager for several hours going over it with a red pen, before rewriting it all again - and possibly a third and fourth time. This is an annual process everyone has to do - in an organisation of less than two hundred people.
4) Generate statistics on demand using the Kafkaesque database filled with incorrect data. The people who request the statistics are often the bigwigs who should be putting pressure on the teams entering wrong data to get it right. Instead, they blame us for not being able to provide pinpoint-accurate stats.
On top of this, the organisation is one which was set up many years ago by the government of the day, purely to win votes (or at least avoid losing them too badly). Our job is to (badly) administer a grudging, barrel-bottom-scraping once-off handout to a particular demographic in such a way as to either avoid them asking for it at all because of the red tape and endless legal dragging-out, or make the result as minimal and hard-won as possible. Or at least, that's the way we seem to be run.
No government then or since has liked our existence. Our HQ has been put at the point in the country furthest away from our capital. Our funding has been cut over and over again. Anyone with any career ambitions looks elsewhere. We fill up with the incompetent, the pitiful, temps, and people who have no other choice. We choke and drown in our own red tape. And looking at the yearly stats, the demand for our 'service' peaked years ago and the way it's tailing off, we'll have no business at all by 2015.
Given all of this, walking into work each morning is like slipping into a warm, reeking sewer of bad practice and infighting. I've analysed the problems all the way up the line, and the only way to fix them (after seeing how they're all intertwined) is to either replace the people at the top with someone actually competent who will authorise the necessary changes, or simply burn the place to the ground and beat the flames out with sledgehammers, then start over.