October 18, 2003

Overtime and the myth of it being worth it

I really need to find a different job soon before I go insane. I was in a meeting the other day about the release that we just had and how much it sucks. Of course engineering knew this before it was released, and had said so, but does anyone listen to engineering? In fact, engineering told everyone that it would suck 3 months ago when we were told that we had to add X features and we had X days to get it done in. And now sales of course wants engineering to fix it, and in less than a week. After the meeting I was talking to some of the guys that have been around a while, and they were talking about how when VP of Engineering and the VP of Product Management were told they had to have the release done by a certain date, and they said that it could not be done, and they were told to shut up because it had to be done by that time.

There is just something fundamentally wrong with the company. I can't keep working for a company that considers its engineers just a piece of equipment to be used. Why should the engineers have to work weekends and late nights? I don't understand what the rational is - if they don't, will they lose their jobs? if they do, and the company does well (not likely), what is the outcome? More work, even longer hours? Will the common people, the ones in the trenches, the ones that make it possible for sales and biz-dev to have something to sell, and to be able to make sweet contracts, ever make any real money even if the company does really, really well? Maybe ten or twenty grand on the stock, maybe? sounds good, but at what cost? Giving up your life for 2-3 years - how is that worth it? Why not take a job that pays the same, but you don't have to work insane hours, and just get a second job at Starbucks or McDonalds? You could easily make 10-20 grand doing that, with way less time. How does this make any sense to anyone?

Of course maybe that is the point, maybe all the companies are the same way, maybe they all treat their engineers this way? I find that hard to believe. I do believe that many companies are that way, and that is the problem with the software industry. Can we change the industry by refusing to work the insane hours and insisting on being able to have a life? A family? The ability to do the things that mean something in the end? Another one of those critical mass things. Enough engineers have to stand up and say no - too few and they will just lose their jobs, and no one notices, and it does no one any good.

Posted by Scott at 9:30 AM | Comments (0)

September 18, 2003

Ranting about my job

Not enough hours in a day.

Actually not true.

More like not enough minutes in an hour.

See, it is like this. In my job, I have to coordinate and give status on many projects. Problem is, there are so many meetings that I have to be in to give status, that I don't have enough time to actually go find out what the status is for the said project.

The trite answer is to work harder.

That does not work, as most of the time is spent listening to things that have no bearing on what I need to know, or need to be doing. The nature of meetings. But of course I can't just bail on the meetings. Maybe I can, maybe that is the answer? Not if I want to keep my job. So it comes down to whether I want to do my job well, but piss people off because I won't come to their meetings, or keep people happy, but do a crappy job. So it comes down to doing a bad job if I want to keep my job.

How is this a good thing?

Course I could work longer hours.

Not that that would help. Because if the people that I need to get status from are not around in the longer hours, that does not help. I could send them email, request status. But I already get too much email, which is part of the reason that I cannot find out the status of projects, because when I am not in meetings giving status, I am answering email giving status. Not to mention that email status reports suck. No one wants to write them, no one wants to read them. And they only give status on things that are going great and things that are slipping horribly. The stuff in between, the stuff that is going to come back to bite you because you never saw it coming, that is the stuff that never gets reported in the status reports. You have to ask that face to face to get a straight answer. The projects that you know are going to fail, and badly, everyone else knows that they are going to fail, so a report telling you that it is failing does not do anyone any good. It just makes the person writing the report feel like a smuck and a loser, when it is usually not their fault. The projects that go really bad, usually go really bad because the project is not in the hands of the people that can actually do anything about it.

Those are my opinions, and I am sticking to them.

It is just a sad state of affairs that to look like you are doing a good job and keep the people you report to happy, you have to do a crappy job and make peoples' life hell.

Not much you can do with those lemons other than spend the paycheck...

Posted by Scott at 8:53 AM | Comments (0)