What's it all about, Alfie?

I'll admit to being as passionate as anyone I know about lots of things. I can get upset about things, impassioned by things, and in general the only thing I really try to avoid is not feeling as that is just no fun at all.

Recently, work has become far more confrontational than even I find acceptable. At first, I thought these people would be upset, and then let things die down and get back to the business of doing business. I could not have been more wrong.

I've got people upset at me because I dare to propose that their scheme is not the best solution to the problem... I've got others upset with me because a trader asked to bypass them and deal directly with me... and while I suppose the former is at least partly my fault because I could lie and say they had a good plan, the latter is totally out of my control and yet I'm the target.

I just talked to my only real friend here and he said what I was thinking at that exact same moment - This place is sucking my will to live..

I realize that things aren't great... I know the economy is bad, and I'm willing to deal with the problems associated with this job so long as it's something I can control and have some power to effect. Unfortunately, this place is far more like a small business than anyone here probably realizes. The politics of the "boss' favorite" and the "problem child" are all too clear here. I thought I gave that up when I stopped running my own business. I was wrong... in such a big way.

I'm going to have to try and look past this. Try to look towards something that is interesting, even if it doesn't really have a lot of use to anyone. I need to be able to motivate myself to get up in the morning and come into this place. I know these are my jobs. This is life. But this place certainly makes it a lot harder than I can remember it being for a very, very, long time.

I know it's not good to laugh at people that aren't meaning to be funny but some times it's all I can do not to laugh at some folks around here. There was this one time that a developer assured me that decrementing loops - that is, loops whose indeces start at their largest value and then work their way to the smallest, were more efficient than the more standard incrementing kind. I didn't want to argue, and I didn't want to laugh, but it was awfully hard not to at least smile. This upset him more than an argument, I'm guessing and he got very upset at me.

Then there's the situation I've run across today. One of the traders just wanted to come directly to me to get answers because he felt more comfortable coming to me than to my "boss". Now I say "boss" because this man has said We're all on the same Team, and, in fact, I don't take a lot of direction from him other than what features to implement. So when the Trader went to the CTO to get the "OK" to come directly to me, he said "Sure". Then my "boss" got very upset.

People are the funniest things. In Stranger in a Strange Land the author makes the point that humor is about the pain another is feeling. It didn't take me long to agree completly with his premise. And in the case of these two people, they brought their own misery down upon themselves. This is really what makes for good humor.

I remember doing a few really bonehead things here at work right in front of people and they (rightfully) nailed me on it. I was being a bit goofy and it cost me. Nothing major, but enough to get a good laugh out of it. Oh sure, I didn't laugh right away, but I did laugh at it later. It's important in raising good kids to laugh at the situations we, as parents, get ourselves into. It's the only thing that keeps us sane at times.

So for as long as I'm working with Bill Cosby and Jerry Seinfield I might as well enjoy the moments, because they certainly aren't.

The Second War is getting heated and I'm trying to step out of it as best I can. I don't believe that anyone wins a war - there's only the victor and the vanquished, and neither really wins. One has to continue the opression or be faced with an uprising and the other must continue the fight or else loose everything. The shooting may stop, but the hostilities don't.

Of late, the battles drawn have been both overt and subtle. I've been trying to keep things professional, but it seems that the other combatants are not as interested in taking that same tac. Unfortunate. I have tried to not get too ugly, but being passionate about the outcome places a burden on me to do my level best to ensure success. This means fighting with like-minded tools and techniques. So if they sling mud, I'm picking up mud.

Until yesterday afternoon.

I've decided that there's more hard done to my cause by acting like them than acting like I want to act, and setting myself up as an "easy target". The simple fact is that I am up-front and fairly transparent, so I am an easy target for those looking at taking shots at me. But that says a lot about both of us. And I'm happy about what it says - about both of us.

So, when my impulses rise up to strike back at slanderous and inflammatory remarks, I'm going to do my best to remain calm and professional. I hope that simple fact will help draw a distinction between the people and their plans. I could be hopelessly romantic about this and get blind-sided, but then that says a lot about the management. If they play that way, then it's best I find it out sooner than later.

Even if I'm a silly fool and get blown out of the water, I'm going to try to act like the person that I want my kids to grow up to be. If we all can't act that way, then how can we possibly expect our kids to be any
different?

The bad thing about revolutions brought about by the death of The King is that there's a second battleground that has to be fought - the War of The Winners.

What I mean is best seen in an example: within the last week the higher ups at my workplace have decided that the existing infrastructure for moving data around is not going to cut it anymore. In fact, they haven't liked it for quite a while, but it had a guardian angel that has since left for greener pastures (at the point of a gun), and so the infrastructure he championed is also going out the door.

But what to replace it with?

There's the second war.

There are at least three camps now fighting it out for the technical vision of the replacement technology/system. One I'll call the Plan Big camp, the other No Plan, and the final Right Fit. I'm in the Right Fit camp, and believe that since we can't get the users to plan 3 months out, there's no reason to plan and build three months out as it's all too likely to change. Also, we don't have a pressing need for any new technology, we just need to execute better on the current technology.

The Plan Big camp is big into technologists leading the users. They believe that they know what we'll need 3-, 6-, 9-months down the road and want to create a grand plan that will enable everything to be done easier by investing 3, 6, or 9 months in heads-down development on new technologies so that we don't get left behind.

The No Plan is just as it sounds - make no plans further away than right now, maybe two days out, and assume that things will just work out. Interestingly enough, the commanders of the No Plan and Plan Big are both convinced that they are the smartest person they know and the other commander is a complete dolt.

So as the next few months pass it'll be interesting to see which, if any, of the camps really wins, and what happens as a result. Depending on who wins, there's certain to be a good bit of sabotage and glee in partial failure.

And I thought dealing with my kids was difficult at times...

Work is quiet for the most part but I've had an interesting chat with one of the Unix SysAdmins on one of the several Linux boxes I have in production at the time. I can't have root access, but they allow sudo access, and that's good enough for me as I can do all I need on the boxes assuming that the sudo command is working. Well... late yesterday sudo started rejecting my password on one of my production boxes. No big deal - I'm still able to login to the box with SSH, but it's something I wanted fixed. Maybe it was in NIS, maybe not, but I wanted them to restart services to see if it was NIS. Big Mistake.

They looked at the box and couldn't figure out the problem. This is not a big surprise as these are not the very best admins I've ever encountered in my days and from talking to others around here, this is not an uncommon belief. Their 'solution' to the problem was to first upgrade the machine to '011' - their numbering scheme for semi-custom RedHat builds, and the second was to say that Linux really isn't stable enough to allow for the 201 days of uptime that this box had.

Clowns.

I told them just to reboot the box as that will most likely clear things up and leave it at that. They think it's important to move to their "latest" release when they don't have a good idea of the problem. Holy Cow! I know it's not a really high paying job, but given that these people have a lot of power, it's amazing that they don't screen them a little bit better than they currently do. Yikes!

OK... first, I can't imagine why on earth they make a custom build of the kernel as well as custom OpenSSH packages (to name just two). These can't possibly be kept as up-to-date as the developers of these same packages, but they insist that it's for security reasons. Amazing. Really.

Then when I have a reasonably stable system (on average > 200 days uptime) they want to rebuild it with yet another of their crazy distributions as opposed to just learning the systems they have and be able to fix them. I know there are some in the Linux Admins that are very knowledgeable and could probably figure out this problem, but they are not available to do this work because they are too busy doing hardware verification, creating new builds of the kernel (I still can't get over that), etc. It's amazing that a place like this is run this way.

But life goes on... slowly, and with great gnashing of teeth, but it goes on.

I read an interesting article today about the role of the Artisan in the human experience. Very interesting thoughts - lots that hit very close to home for me. It's a battle with frustration to be sitting in this place where so much can be done, and yet because of some (understandably) important decisions nothing is being done. I understand business decisions - I owned a business for 5 years, there should be the realization that the business of business is to keep moving forward on things. Never sit still. Unfortunately, that's not being done here. So we limp along.

Maybe I'll plan for what should be done and then see if it's worth implementing this. It'll certainly give me something to do while they make the decisions that will decide what direction we're going to take.

OK, I started this entry comparing the place I work to a dead/dieing place and crossing the river Styx. That's probably harsh as there are still reasonable people here that care about what's happening, but they're getting fewer and fewer each day, and I'm concerned that they are giving up like I am. Not that it's a good thing to admit that, but it's honest. So instead of talking about this place in the past tense, I decided to talk about trying to find the "Silver Lining" in the clouds. No matter how hard that may be from time to time.

For example, it's a bad economy - $1 trillion on the sidelines waiting for some movement in the market to get back in. It's also a bad time to be an American with pride in their elected officials - Bush is going against the longest standing effective treaty organization - NATO, as well as the UN. It's also the middle of March and it's 20 degrees below normal in Chicago - below zero this morning.

OK... so let's spend a little time thinking about the good things.

Well, with $1 trillion ready to flow back into the market, when things start to move, it'll be a very interesting time to be in the industry. Like having the only tickets to a great show and everyone wanting them. That'll be interesting to see. Lots of moves, lots of re-investment. OK, that's going tobe interesting.

We only have a few more years of the current administration, but there's a lot that can go wrong in that time. However, with Tony Blair getting into hot water with his own party, maybe it'll be enough to slow down the US unilateral response and allow a little more support from at least our traditional allies in NATO. I'm not a fool enough to think that Iraq won't get hit over this silly business, but going it alone will either look exceptionally prophetic or exceptionally rash. I'm against the extremes as that's typically not a good place to be.

OK, so we're not going to see a nice silver lining from that front, but if things can slow down a bit and a more direct/targeted/measured response tried, then that's gotta be a good thing. If the President thinks a man is a danger to this country, then this country has the right/responsibility to take that person out. In WWII the Allies would have hung Hitler (to the happiness of many), and rightly or wrongly, each nation state has that same choice. The responsibility comes in when other countries think we're out of control and start doing the same thing to our elected officials.

OK, so things aren't looking too nice in the geopolitical area, but at least we still have NATO and the UN. Maybe something good will still come from all this. I will say that if the money flows in due to a more stable market (due to a more stable geopolitical climate) then working here will be a little bit nicer as there will be more money and that will mean some of the folks around here will have more breathing room and therefore can afford to be a little nicer. That'll help, and if things really improve then the economy will pick up and the market for IT types might pick up again and that will mean options - and that's really good.

So it's all about linings, I guess. That or self-delusional behavior. Either way, it's working for me. 🙂

For the past few days at work there seems to be an insidious problem that is causing the server processes to have to be restarted in order to clean themselves up. This happened three times yesterday - an all-time high. The problem is that I didn't design the networks, and certainly don't maintain them, so if there's a router problem, I'll never know it. I'm concerned that since this is a typical network problem - here one second and gone the next, that it's likely not to get fixed until it gets horribly worse.

Then there's the home networking that's having problems this morning as well. This morning before I left for the train I ran into the problem that I didn't seem to be getting out to the internet. So I restarted the NAT service and things seemed to be a little better, but I think there was a bad DNS issue that makes simple tasks like browsing hard eventhough the real connectivity is there. We'll have to see when I get home, but I think it's probably cleared up by now.

So today is one of those times when things are going poorly at work and the level of support is rising a lot due to these problems. The code hasn't changed in months, the user base hasn't changed, the markets are changing but not like this... so what's causing the problem? Maybe it's not the network, but it's the only thing that I can think of that's capable of causing these types of problems, and is out of our control to check and repair, if necessary.

Having been in the network support scene for years - including leased lines that are without doubt the worst things to support if you don't have an excellent carrier, I know that the infrastructure gets blamed for a lot of things that aren't really its fault. So I've tried to be easy on the complaints, but when a user is asking what you think the problem is, you have to give them the best knowledge you have. It's not a great situation to be in.

Then again, the guys that put this network together at work aren't the totally sharpest in the land, either. When we moved in we had a terrible time getting the NICs on 100Mbps/half-duplex when the switches were supposed to be auto-sensing. For all the Linux workstations we had to have the switch set to 100/full and then force the driver as well. It was a real pain to figure this out... lots of lost time on that one. So it really could be the network... I just wish it'd get cleared up.

OK... I had hoped that the problems at work stopped with the layoff of half the IT staff. I was wrong.

Last week, the COO came and talked to me and had a problem that he needed to talk to me about. Basically, my consulting rate (because they didn't want to hire me) was the highest in the organization, and one of the Managing Directors kept bringing up my rate in particular and wanted it lowered. I pointed out the the COO that I'm worth more than the rest, and he agreed 100%. But my rate still had to come down.

One option was hiring me as an employee, but when I mentioned to him that after checking my finances, I couldn't take a 2003 hit of $54,000.00 to become an employee, and maybe we could work out a signing bonus to make things fit. He felt that was being greedy of me. I explained that had I known that the offer would be made this year, I'd have spent last year getting a few things in order so that I could take the $54,000/yr one-time hit.

He seemed to understand, but I still think he believes I'm being greedy.

His latest list of options comes down to this:

• him paying a rate of no more than $90/hr to the consulting company I'm billed out of
• me being hired
• us making an exit strategy

I have to admit, the man has big ones. Really big ones. He doesn't have any way to replace me, nor is it possible given this environment to find someone to replace me on short-notice. Also, he knows that he's not going to hire me... he's never really made anything but vague promises in that regard, and while I've stopped trying to push it, it is something I wished would have happened a while ago.

So my rate is getting cut.

Not my total cost to the business - he doesn't care that I work more than 40 hrs./week - he's more than happy to have me work as many hours as I can. So he's not really interested in the cost I represent to the business as a whole - he's interested in not having that Managing Director hassle him that he has one very good worker that has a rate that's more than the others. Amazing.

I've decided that this place is just too messed up to stay - so in a way I'm glad the employment didn't work out.

OK, this morning I was really looking forward to a meeting between a co-worker and management. The focus was to be the wish list they had asked him/us to prepare to make the environment more pleasurable. Naturally, the list included things that they were likely not to say "Yes" to, but also many 'small' things that they could easily say "Yes" to.

We expected them to give in to the request(s) for offices - seeing as how we now have a lot of empty space on the floor due to the cuts, and I even bet the co-worker that his request for a raise would be agreed to. We both wondered if they'd agree to the suggestion to really stop the work on the project we are both working on now due to lack of resources. Honestly, we both didn't think they'd really do it, but it was meant to show them that we think their project planning has left out a few critical things - like the people to really make this large a project successful.

What came out of the meeting was very surprising to both of us.

They aren't going to give out offices - because they are planning on leasing them out to other divisions in the Bank! This means that in all likelyhood we'll be "relocated" to a "reservation" on the floor and then the space we had on the floor will be given to another group in the Bank and they will move in.

This bothers me on so many different levels - but all of them personally. In the end, a cube is a cube, and it really doesn't matter, but the idea that cutting half the IT staff isn't enough of a cut to keep the space and be a little generous to those few that are staying is a bit disturbing. Also, there are several people that have desks on the trading floor and offices - and I'm not talking about traders here... no, these are some of the IT folks.

What bothers me about this is the idea that we haven't reached the "bottom" in our slide - contrary to their statements.

They aren't interested in anything that costs them a dime - which is understandable if you realize that they are going to be giving up the space in order to save some bucks. I had expected that when you cut half the people you sort-of give yourself some breathing room, but I guess I was wrong.

Additionally, I learned today that one of the desks has 20+ people - a few traders, but mostly developers and researchers (basically, prototype developers). This is in stark comparison to the five - that's right - five developers under the organization's CTO. It just makes no sense that a trader should manage a larger IT budget and staff than the CTO. If he's that much better at being the CTO, then that should be his job. But, maybe that will change. Who knows.

So... it's been a bit of a disappointment as they seem to believe that on the reduced staff it's Business as Usual and no de-emphasis of the workload is in the offing. This made me very nervous as it meant that I was going to be stuck with these jobs forever. Just like handcuffs.

Then I realized something - I've got them as bad as they have me. It's just as easy for me to 'yank' on the handcuffs and have their wrists hurt as it is the other way around. This thought cheered me up as I realized that I still had some power, and therefore control over my own professional life here. Not a lot of control - just as much as you get with a pair of handcuffs.

OK, it's back to work like millions of other folks, and I have to say that I'm very happy with my life today. Yesterday we went shopping and picked up The Rolling Stones' Forty Licks and I loaded it on my MP3 player last night. I've been listening to it all morning and it's a lot of good music that I listened to all my life. I can't say that I really like the band, but the music they make has been great milestones of my life. Very nice trip down memory lane. Excellent music.

It's also nice to get back in the saddle and start writing code again. It's an important part of who I am - just like a serious runner needs to run to feel good, I need to create, and use my brain. Thankfully, this place has no shortage if ideas - both good and really not so good, but that's the ups and downs, I guess. In any case, I'm able to stretch today and get some code fixed, add a few things, and make it a little nicer. That's a win no matter how you look at it.

I also like being about to talk to me friends at work again. Not that we're a big 'water cooler' bunch, but with the cuts, and the lack of direction in many areas, it's a source of a lot of talk. Then again, there's the Holidays and it's nice to hear about what other people got.

It's just a really good day to be back.