Content Warning: Corporate life, Yet Another Node About Noding
I’ve been trying to write this daylog since yesterday, and the main reason why I keep deleting it is that I end up ranting a lot about my job and the situations that led me here. If you know me, you know I’m not against a good ol’ rant, but writing at length about my work is—I believe—not the best idea.
So let me summarize the last few months (!) for you all:
- I get a new job, training is scheduled to last 3 months;
- At the same time, a bunch of problems already brewing up reach critical pressure;
- Before my 3 months are up, these problems somehow stick together and blow up in a chain reaction;
- This leads to a ton of, uh, let’s say non-standard movements at the team, which puts us in dire need of re-organization;
- When the dust settles, my current boss and I are both put in our current roles, none of us really knowing what to do;
- At the same time, there’s other company-wide work overdue. Tons of it is assigned to my boss which leads both of us to declare a sort of emergency state because we need to
- Return to normality in the day-to-day activities,
- Improve our numbers, and
- Finish that overdue work (scheduled for March)
- This means that a significant portion of my boss’ responsibilities are temporarily shifted to me (mind you, at the same time that I’m learning the ropes of my own new position),
- ???
- Suddenly, 5 months pass. My boss and I—both haters of meetings—hold a 3-hour meeting between us, just to dissect what the hell just happened in the last 6 months and start to plan ahead.
So what the hell happened with my boss and I? In short: we were «lucky».
We didn’t know each other before being thrown into these positions, so we had to learn not only those responsibilities, but also how to work with each other. Turns out, we’re both the same brand of perfectionists, and our skillsets are 90% non-overlapping—which in our case was a major advantage because we have a much larger pool of tools at our disposition.
Not only that, we very quickly recognized that we were thrown to the lions (maybe even maliciously, expecting us to fail) so our modus operandi defaulted to us watching each other’s back. Our first instinct was to trust in the other person in the absence of any other information or even support.
Somehow, slowly but surely, we got into the pattern of trying to find a solution for the problems at hand, without keeping score of who suggested how many. Discuss, implement, analyze, iterate, rinse repeat. Then, another curveball comes our way, then another.
While this looks good on paper, in practice it ended up like a seesaw overloaded at both ends as mentioned: they took on more responsibilities and I took on their «neglected» responsibilities. The job was being done, the problems were being solved, more problems were left on our collective lap. Until the breaking point.
March and April were brutal. Both exhausted but more or less incapable of slowing down until the overdue work (see 6.c.) was finally done, last Friday.
To use a baseball metaphor, turns out we were both very good at fielding whatever was thrown to us, regardless of our actual positions in the field. Pair that with people who puposefully moved out of the way to let us field those balls and you get a winning team where only two people are exhausted and the rest are OK. Success, right?
Continuing the metaphor, we started fielding whatever ball came our way without true coordination among ourselves. We stumbled on each other’s toes more than once, but we didn’t complain because another hit would come our way as soon as we caught the last one. Very few errors and a very high flyout rate meant that «we were doing great».
And so, the match was won, but at what cost?
One of the «costs» I had to pay was to suspend anything that required me to actually think hard, including writing. Video games were good as long as I didn’t have to consider complex systems, I resorted to re-reading old books instead of new ones for a couple of months. I stopped my (admittedly slow) self-taught watercolor lessons.
It’s not all complains, but it’s a warning for myself, more than any other «long» period I’ve been away from e2. This was, mostly, a forced retreat of my own doing. I don’t like the few drafts I’ve done since January, and I don’t even understand why I was interested in those subjects. I’m awfully tired, but it’s not like I didn’t have time to rest, I just didn’t manage my time as well as I could.
So yes, here I am. I’ll start replying to you all slowly but surely. Word Enchiladas are coming back, but I’m not giving any ETA. The sillyness will return. I’ve missed you all so much. But I need to rest and decompress properly.