That's Why They Call It Work

Well, work has only gotten worse. The manager of the backbone engineers quit on Thursday, and I think two more of my colleagues are going to quit on Monday, possibly three, in fact. The manager was replaced with a different manager (lateral move for that guy, but really sort of a promotion since it comes with a lot more responsibility) who is a decent manager but isn't much of an engineer. With the current staff, I don't think he'll do too well. Of course, I'm betting that at least 50% of the staff will turn over now anyway.

While I was on vacation, a small project was taken away from my group and assigned to IT. I had told the product managers (the ones who made this choice) that I'd have the software written on time, but they didn't believe me, apparently. I was already bitter enough that they didn't trust me, but then when they came back and asked for help, well. They didn't bother to find out if the folks they assigned the project to had the knowledge and resources to complete it. They lacked yet more information: the folks they assigned it to are skilled, but in a completely different way. This further hinders my helping them since the IT folks decided to write in C++, something I would never have chosen.

Not until another part of IT told them that their policy forbid using a test server to get data from a production server did they start to realize that they'd made a bad decision. Never mind that it's my production data and the programmer in question only had read-only access to the data -- whenever IT says something is "policy", you can just forget about delivering anything on time. It's an intractable problem.

Then, of course, the Product Manager decided they'd rather have me deliver the project. I'll take it back, but man, am I not happy about it.

I wish I could quit on Monday.