Decompression is Really Hard!
I had no idea that the decompression I'd feel from leaving Finance and entering a pseudo-startup. I really didn't. In the beginning, I was thinking it'd be really nice. Sleep in… have lots of vacation… take your time learning new things - what's not to like about that? But that's not the whole picture, is it? It's never as easy as one quick look might suggest.
Today is another great example of some of the problems I'm facing in moving from where I was to where I am - and it's not about jerks, or mean people… it's about being in a Team, and having a Team member decide that he knows better than you - even though he's got far less experience than you.
I'm currently in a team that has lost three people - one to leaving the company, and two to other positions in the company. Unfortunately, two of those were really good guys, and I'm going to miss their approach to software development. As I told my manager yesterday in a 1:1, every project has "grunt work" to do - things that have to get done to move the project forward, and get deliverables out the door. It's called production for a reason.
Now I'm good at delivering code. Really good. Primarily because in Finance, you have to be, or you have to find another job. So I got good at it. That's not to say that's what I prefer to do, but I know that if the team doesn't deliver, it's not going to be long before they look to "lighten the load" of the team. I've no intention of that happening to me.
So I pick up the work if it's sitting there.
In a good team, others do this as well, so any one individual does a little, and the load is not dependent on one guy doing it all. But if you're in a group of people where they don't see that as "necessary", or they feel it's "beneath them", then you end up with a group that's very dysfunctional. In my case, that's where I am - doing about 90% of the code that's delivering.
This by itself, wouldn't be so bad. After all, I know what I'm doing, I trust that management sees the effort I'm putting in, and I'll get compensated for it. Not bad. But for the last several days, one of the guys in the group has been working on integrating the log files with an automated scraper - splunk, and while it was possible to build all the queries he needed with the tools at hand, and the log lines as they were, he decided that it was really time to make the logs less human readable, and more easily used by splunk.
This, I argued, wasn't a good idea. Log files are for people, not machines, and this was making them less readable, and that was bad. I tried to convince him that this was a bad direction, and he'd have none of it. No way I was going to convince him.
All this work - three days worth, because he wanted to gather a series of numbers in one query - not two.
Really!?
Two queries is "Bad"?
I had to walk away. I tried to talk him out of it. Just like I told my manager I'd try to do. But he was insistent. Totally unwilling to compromise. Yet I caught several errors he'd made because he wasn't paying attention to what he was doing.
I really hate this. I'd rather he just take time off and not be a problem as opposed to making things worse for me. And that's all he's really done. He's made the logs worse, and for no good reason whatsoever. None. The data was there, it's now there, but in a non-human-readable form, and he thinks that's "even"?
These kids, and that's all I can think it is… these kids have no respect for experience. None. But hey… why should they? They have done it all, right? They have built it, and it only took three days. Total crock.