There’s Nothing Quite Like Being Kicked While You’re Down
Today was one of those days that, I believe, defines what kind of person you are. Are you a person that can knuckle down and do what's needed even though every fiber of your being is screaming that it's the wrong thing to do? Where is the individual and the team defined in your mind? How much can the team request as sacrifice from the individual? It's interesting questions because we all think we know where we sit on the questions, but it's really when push comes to shove that we learn where we really sit.
Today I thought I was done with a very distasteful bit of coding. To call it a 'bit' is to call Lake Michigan a 'pond'. It was a week of 11-hour days of the most intense, horriffic coding that I've done in a very long time. But, like ripping a band-aid off, once it was done, I could move on to nicer things.
Yet, as soon as I was done I got several requests from folks "...yeah, I wasn't right on that, it needs to be like this..." and "Great! Now add this". In the end, I received in a 4 hour period enough work to keep me busy for the rest of this week, and possibly into the next.
To add to this insult, some of the requests were for changes in the Flex client part of the project. While I've done some Flex coding, it's nothing like what I needed to do the request, and I said so. The original author that handed me this project said "Sure, it's doable". I wanted to scream at him then and there: Shut up unless you are going to do the change! But I didn't. I'm already too "gruff" for the office.
So I'm back at the bottom. It was as if all the work didn't matter - worse it was because of all the work that I got more. I wanted to sit and cry - or maybe just plain leave. I had been telling management that this system was a pain to work in... like it taking more than 5,000 lines of java code to add less than a dozen fields to the system... it's a monster and it's not getting any easier to work with given all the additions.
So to hear that I had effectively brought down more work in this horrible project upon myself was simply more than I could bear. I was more than a little angry at the original developer who, like Pilot, had washed his hands of his horrible incarnation. If only...
Anyway, I had a bunch more work to do, so laying it out in my notes, I dug in and started working. What I found was that the requests had generated a ton of new work. Amazing. They think these things are "simple", or "easy", and in a good system, they would be, but this isn't a good system. It's not even "reasonable." It's crummy - and that's being kind.
So, now I'm down... then I'm kicked... and it's not getting any better anytime soon. I still need to do all this work, and then I'm sure there's going to be add-ons after that. In a very real sense, I've learned that my skills are like anything of value: a double-edged sword, and I'm feeling the cuts very deeply today.
Because I can do this, I'm told to do this.
Regardless of my warnings, advice, professional judgement... none of that matters because a few days of my time is considered insignificant and the results fantastic. Who cares if I want to scream every minute of every hour while I'm doing it?
Gotta love the "bottom line".