The Final Falling Out – Sad to See it Happen
Well... I've been in the midst of this "brain dump" - the last two weeks of this job, and this morning I realize that I've had the final falling out with a co-worker that I've worked with more or less comfortably by for many years. It's not something I could have helped, really. Nor is it totally unexpected. The guys taking over my projects are being pressured to be able to build and deploy the codebase before I leave. Sounds like a good plan. Some are taking it a step further: they want to be able to re-create the entire environment I've used. That's a much bigger task.
To be able to go to a specific machine that has all the infrastructure set-up for the project, check out the code, build it and deploy it is a reasonable goal in a few days. But to understand the infrastructure - for example, one of my projects uses Tibco. In order to run Tibco, you need to get the license file from the higher-ups and then place it in the path, and then put in an entry into /etc/init.d for rvd and then get it added to the environment, and then running. It's possible, but it's not really as important as being able to build the code that uses Tibco.
When there's time, the deeper investigation of the infrastructure can be looked at. And at that time, there will be sufficient experience with the project so that there's an understanding of what the infrastructure components are doing and why. But for now, that's really a step beyond the initial cut of "check-out, build, deploy". It's a good goal, but it's not something that should be viewed as an absolute requirement.
But it seems to be viewed that way by this co-worker.
When he asked me how to get this one service going, I suggested that doing it on this one box was the right thing to do. When that wasn't sufficient for his desires, without further explanation on his part, he got mad. And stayed mad. I got the feeling yesterday afternoon that he was upset with me not helping him in this regard - but to be fair, even if it was in the plan for him, me doing it would be wrong because that means that the people left here are not learning how to do these tasks.
Either way, my hands were tied, and he didn't like that.
Understandable, and I can see a lot more of this coming in the weeks and months ahead. I expect to hear a lot of nasty things being said about me in my absence. This place was busy when I was here, and I was doing a lot of things. Remove me, and everyone's workload increases significantly, and that's not going to make anyone happy.
So it seems to have started here, in my last week on the job. I tried to talk to him about it this morning, and I can see that it's clearly just as sore an issue with him as it was yesterday. He's upset, and he thinks I'm being horrifically unreasonable. I think I'm trying to make it easier on him, and if he insists on going that extra mile, then he needs to know that I can't possibly help him without negating the effort he's putting forth.
Oh well... there's nothing I can really do about it. He's upset for what he believes are valid reasons. Perception is far more important than Reality - so true.