Once Again, Work Stress Kills my Posts
This morning I noticed that once again, work, not laziness, has killed my posting here. I really hate that. One of the real joys of what I do is being able to write a little bit about it every day, but the way things have been going at The Shop, that's nearly impossible these last few weeks. It's been non-stop work on finishing up the Greek Engine project, and dealing with the fact that ultimately, we are helpless to really have the kind of system we'd like to have because the people maintaining the instrument data just don't seem to have it together.
I'm trying to believe that they are doing their best, but it's getting increasingly hard to believe that. I don't want to think badly of people, but when I come in to a database with five instruments in it - not the 400,000+ I was expecting, then it's really hard to think that they even did any testing at all on the data. I know it's a matter of expectations and abilities, and for the longest of time the expectations have been crazy low, but at some point you can't fall back to that and have to take some level of responsibility for your actions.
I can write the greatest code in the world, but what my users are going to remember is that the data coming out of it was horrible, and therefore my app was horrible, all because of bad data. There's no way around it. The Team depends on every single person doing their job. There just are no unimportant roles.
It's just heartbreaking to me to see this. Having put in the work I have to see the complete and total lack of personal responsibility in the quality of the data I'm getting. It really is just heartbreaking.
But then to add insult to the injury, I'm unable to write about it all. Unable to vent about it. I've tried and tried to make this a priority, but in the end, I know myself. When there is code to write and I have time before the train, I'm going to write it. That's my work-ethic, and there's very little I can do about it - even if I wanted to. Which I don't.
I'm going to have to try harder. I'm afraid that in the end, this is just the wrong job. Maybe it's a matter of timing. Maybe it's more fundamental than that, I don't know. I'll try to give it all the time I can to turn around, and I know there are people here really trying to turn this around. But if things don't change, I know there will come a point where I simply have to disconnect myself from this place in order to save myself.
I hope I can hold out.