Getting Spun Up Again
Today the pod is still as quiet as a cemetery - primarily, I believe, because of the "issue" that occurred yesterday between my manager, Ralph, and myself, that I wrote about yesterday. Looking back at it, there was bound to come a time when we were going to have a clash like this. If he's convinced that he can code better than I can (and that was what this was really all about), then it was going to come up sooner or later. I'm glad it's out there, but it does tend to put a damper on the group dynamic for a while.
This morning I'm trying to get spun up and excited about being here, for as long as I'm here - or maybe as long as Ralph's my manager here, I'm open to all kinds of ideas now. Anyway, I'm doing some of the work Ralph asked me to do this month, and it was actually a little fun, which is great, as that's just what I needed.
Then I started updating the release notes for my web app and things dipped again.
One of the problems voiced by me as well as Ralph's managers is that he's asking me to build things that no one asks for. He's really doing speculative development, which isn't bad if it's small things like workflow changes, or helpful features, but when it's wholesale new data sets and features, it can cause problems. Such was the case this morning.
I have written a new component to the web app, and it's based on data that we can't possibly hold right now. We've had a database on order for months, memory on order for weeks, and it's taking a long time to get these things in house and installed. While I don't resent any of that, I do resent the idea that Ralph expects me to write the new features on hardware we don't have.
It's not really a compliment, it's an annoyance. It's arrogance on his part, because I'm telling him not to push, but he's saying "do it anyway". The result is, of course, that I'm doing the best I can, but on very limited data sets, so that when he looks at my work, it's all about "now switch it to this one... now this one..." in order to get the value without having to do his job of tracking down the acquisition of resources.
But I try to let that pass because, in the end, he's made my life easier for having made it clear I can't work with him long-term.
But when it rains, it pours.
His next brilliant idea is marketing.
He believes that we need to work to get more folks in The Shop using the application we have developed. Now technically, he agrees that the only customers we have are very satisfied with the work we've done, but that's not good enough. Still, if someone outside our customer group asks for something, I do my best to provide it to them. Again, that's not enough. His next goal is to get user who don't need our application to use it.
He wants is to market the application to internal users.
Now if this mattered to our group's existence, I'd say "OK, let's get out the mass-mailers", but it doesn't. In fact, Ralph has already been accused of doing too much with the platform by his managers. We have already gotten rave reviews by everyone, but still that's not enough.
I'm convinced it's about visibility and recognition. I can see that Ralph can't get enough of either, but I have no idea what happened in his past to make him this way. What I can say is that I'm all for new users using my stuff. I think that's great. But I've done marketing. I'll do some, but that's not what I'm going to want to do for several hours every week. I'd rather be talking to our real users and seeing if I can help them.
It's hard to get excited about your job when you're in a situation like this.