The Compromises We Make – and Those We Don’t
Today I ran into a problem that's somewhat sensitive to me. Because I'm sitting in this cube, and could be doing a lot of other things, I realize that there are certain trade-offs I've made to be here. I'm not in a managerial role, but had I wanted to stay in one, teaching or owning my own company would have afforded me all the opportunity I wanted for that. No... I didn't want that. I like doing, not deciding for a living.
But every now and then there comes along a situation that makes me rather upset with the people I work for. I'm capable of doing the management, and as such, require very little management from above. My management appreciates this, and when it suits them, take full advantage of it.
Today I wanted to get licenses for Tibco for several projects we're working on. This is a replacement of either free or home-grown messaging systems, so there's no obvious feature that this will bring that we don't have now. Yes, it'll be soft factors - industry standard, higher performance, scalability, etc. but today - right now, there's no problem that this addresses. Yet it's a $100,000 expense. Too much for casual spending.
So rather than trust me that it's needed, and will be useful, they want me to make the drawings and slides to show how it'll fit into the next phase of our architecture. If we had run into a problem, they'd never want to see this... they'd want to know what fixes it. But because there's no immediate problem to solve, it's not as important as other things.
Understood... then let's just drop it. I'll wait until it's critical again and then I'll remind you that I mentioned this and you'll say "Well... why didn't you... Oooo!" and we'll do it then. But now, I have to do this for a group of people that either really don't care, or really don't need to care. It's infrastructure stuff, folks. Why spell it out to the web developers how the trade processing will change with a new messaging system? They might care, but when they need to know, they'll ask.
I guess it's the fact that if they thought it was too expensive, just say so and we'll limp along until it's critical and then we'll say "Here's the solution", and get it then. Doing it this way is just part of the reason that I don't own my own company any more - I don't like doing this stuff. And for the vast majority of the time, they don't want me doing this kind of thing - they want me fixing problems or enhancing the products I'm responsible for.
But I have to go through the whole dog and pony show, and let them take it to the Governing Council and then have project charts made, etc. It's turned from a simple little replacement project that'd take a few days to something that will drag out for months. Yucch!