Lexmark

two monitors, venerable WKQQ on my single-speaker radio, stuck at the office on a rainy Saturday when I should be packing up my apartment, that’s Harvid. Management determined last week that my product was so utterly broken that we needed an “All hands on deck” effort to fix it. Since it’d actually cost money to pay contractors overtime, read this as “all REGULAR employees” on deck. So, I’m here pouring through code letting Harvid have full reign. I’m heading home by 6, though, to exercise and relax a bit, then clean-up my house. ...

So, the reality of being team lead strikes home. Four million nits to pick, people complaining, and everyone wants a piece of my time. >>sigh« On the BRIGHT side…They accepted my offer on the new house at 100 Sardula. I called the home inspector, gave my 30 day notice at my apartment (I’ll be out by May 14th), and sent off my check for house appraisal. Exciting :D

1. Get the right people 2. Give them the right tools and training 3. Remove all obstacles to their work 4. Profit. … Seems to be working so far. Of course, the downside to this is what you do if you don’t have the right people.

Up at 4:45 this morning, and I’m still at work. Yikes…this team lead thing is about what it’s cracked-up to be: All the responsibility, no benefits, no real power. Grand.

Had a feeling 05 was going to be life-changing, and that’s come to pass. * I’m wanting to get married * I’m trying to buy a house …And… * I’ve been promoted/demoted/reassigned to be team lead of my product. I now get to “drive” the new function, attend all the meetings, and generally be the point man for the whole thing. This should look good on my resume as I’m assuming more responsiblity and leadership. ...

This week, our software departments gets the rare pleasure of having an on-site consultant. I say rare in that this happens once every 5 years, and such visitation sparks a flurry of new products. It’s a “Big Bang,” if you will, without the follow-up munchies and stinky bedsheets. Anyway, the guy, C, is a unapologetic Canadian ass with a golden-hammer attitude towards the product he’s advocating. “It can do everything well,” he says. Thankfully, the product is free (they make money on consulting), so at least we didn’t have to listen to a hard-sell on the software. ...

Blog from within a useless Meeting: We’re finding that one of our divisions is sort of eating the other one, just based upon merit and the overwhelming personality of its President. :-) I still wonder if I shouldn’t have taken a job over there, though I think they outsourced all their programmers years ago.

Couple of conclusions J. and I came to today after reading Joel Spolsky’s “Guide to Guerilla Interviewing”. 1. We’ve got way too many of the “Get things done”/“Not smart” people. These are folks who treat code like disposable parts, hacking around without thinking. “Anything to make it work” is the mantra for these people. Compentent programmers spend most of their time fixing the sublte (and not too sublte) errors that come from these people. ...

Giving you a snapshot of how overloaded a software engineer can become when he’s working for a hardware company: My current projects/tasks/research items: On my current product: security: Support for test tools for our next printer family that’s currently in test New server function responsibilities Updatest to a spec that’s 3 months out-of-date Unit tests that I haven’t written bug Reports: 7 outstanding (probably will get more) Field issues: none (for now) ...

I can’t sleep. I’ve tossed and turned for nearly two hours, but for some reason I just can’t quiet my mind enough to fall asleep. Plus I have a headache. Plus, I have to be up in 5 hoursto go to my meaningless meeting so a bunch of Indians can piss and moan because I didn’t get to answer their emails last week while I was killing myself to reach an arbitrary deadline set by a lame-duck team lead. ...

Odd experience today: One of my coworkers walked into my office and said, “Harold, are you keeping your MINI?” Faced with selling his Subaru Impreza wagon to a friend in Virginia, W came in and asked me if I was interested in selling my MINI to him. :-) I told him I was not. Financially, it’d probably be smart if I downshifted to having only one car, but I love both my cars too much.

Serenity NOW! >>sigh« Okay, when you’re going on vacation there are certain things you don’t do: -- don’t break the build. This is the prime directive, because if you’re gone, you can’t fix it. -- don’t lock half the libraries in the project just so you know no one (Harold!) can change them on you. This is the “this code is mine damnit” syndrome. I’m hung-out-to-dry today, and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. My parter on this project is out until Monday, and she screwed-up our library system royally. The only workable version of our component is on her system, and I have no way to get to it other than calling her cellphone and asking her for her system password. She didn’t check-it-in to our code library, so I can’t do any of the work assigned to me. ...

I hate our firmware guys I hate our firmware guys I hate our firmware guys I hate our firmware guys I hate our firmware guys I hate our firmware guys I’m not letting this ruin my day or anything (it’s almost over, come hell or high water), but things like this get on my nerves: Firmware and us agreed upon the behavior of our protocol 2 MONTHS AGO, and now it comes-out that both sides misunderstood the requirements. ...

This makes 12 hours at work (and counting), and I’ve been up since 5. Yike.

There’s an emergency project at work that I’ve been pulled off to work on. It means long days and maybe weekends from now until after the first of the year (Bah-humbug). Yay.

Something’s up: All of first line managers in my department are here at 8am, sharp. I smell presentation to the department head :D I finally did get some sleep last night, if only 4 hours or so.

This is the place where an inflammatory blog entry that would’ve gotten me fired once was. If this had been an actual emergency, the announcement you just heard would’ve been followed by official news or instructions. We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog.

I think they’ve blocked me from posting to blogger at work…or else blogger is down. Testing 1…2…3….4…

You know what’s depressing? Working at something you have no control over whatsoever, really, and realizing part of the way through it, it’s not going to work and you should’ve known better to begin with.

I so don’t enjoy coming-in to work these days…same old problems, never fixed, same annoying people I’m forced to deal with. Same team lead who couldn’t lead his way out of a bag, but who’s emasculated enough by managment just to make sure he can’t. Same development processes spread across 10 timezones. Same lousy product with quality that only get worse. Same office with too much fluorescent light, too much chatter, too many people who ENJOY staying until 10 pm, so that they feel it’s necessary to spend three hours a day jawing. ...