Don’t go chasin’ “Waterfall”

In any form change is difficult and different people handle it differently. Some embrace change and want to learn something new. Others will go into it kicking and screaming, fighting all the way but will eventually accept this is the way things are now. Then there are the ones who just out and out refuse change PERIOD! Something new will be rolled out to the team and they will just go about their day as if nothing ever happened. They will continue doing the same thing they’ve done for decades the same way they have done it day in and day out. These “legacy employees” are the biggest hurdle when trying to implement any new methodology.

I’ve been certified in the Agile/SCRUM methodology three different times at three different companies. One of them was an early adopter of Agile/SCRUM but the other two were late comers to the party. Those who brushed Agile/SCRUM off as a “fad” and refused to turn away from Waterfall quickly learned their competition who did take on this new method were beating them in a development speed race. They usually thought they could slide by on name recognition alone so in their collective small minds thought, “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” Never suspecting Waterfall was drowning them. But then the smaller more “agile” companies began biting at their heels. So they would reluctantly make the change. Granted not all companies have woken up from the “Kool-Aid dream” that they’re the hottest shit in town.

A prime example of this was the last company I worked for. They STILL have not adopted Agile/SCRUM even though they’ve been trying to implement it for about three and a half years. Which is not surprising because they had just switched over from Lotus Notes to Outlook the year before (but they still used Lotus for production tickets.) Waterfall was the only bit of security blanket they had left. People would ask me what it was like working there versus past companies and I would tell them it was like going from the Jetsons to the Flintstones. As soon as you walked into the place you could feel the passive aggressive wave wash over you as if you just walked into a banquet thrown by Al Capone minutes before he bashed someone’s skull in with a baseball bat. It wasn’t an outward defiance to Agile/SCRUM. Everyone smiled, nodded, sang the praises of Agile/SCRUM and were “excited” to try something new. But you could tell if you tried to shake up the status quo your future was in question at the company. Which is probably why I don’t work there anymore. There was one interaction I had with a manager which solidified the delusion most of these people were under. We were discussing the project I was working on and why it was almost a YEAR behind its release date. The manager had a hard time wrapping their head around why the company’s competitors were able to release things to production quicker than they were. I nearly bit clean through my tongue. Then they swung around to show me an online article showing the company ranked first and third in the marketplace. I think that says it all.

These are the people that are holding most of the legacy companies in the industry back. They exist in these industries from the top down, and they are an almost immovable entity. Almost. A previous company I was at where I was certified in Agile/SCRUM for the second time was able to move that entity. When they hired a new CTO, he had one initiative in mind when he started. The IT department was going to move to the Agile/SCRUM methodology immediately. With that announcement he gave a warning (mainly for those legacy employees) basically saying, “Get on board or get out of the way.” Of course, none of them heeded that warning. The guys in Dev Ops were the first to go less than a month after the warning was given. A quarter of the department paid the price for their outward disdain for the change. One day a whole row of Business Analysts was walked out. Over the next few weeks one by one developers, testers, project managers etc. disappeared. The CTO was cleaning house! He knew what he had to do to move the company forward into the future. By the way, the other “Flintstone” company I worked for is currently on life support. Although they think they’re doing GREAT!

On Call

When you’re on-call your phone magically transforms into a grenade with the pin pulled out and you spend the duration waiting for it to go off. That’s how I felt whenever it was my rotation on-call for whatever production issues may crop up.

For the week’s rotation I was on-call I may have gotten 3 hours sleep tops. Between the anxiety of not really knowing what I was doing and praying I would not get a call while I was on to waiting for that 3am call how could I sleep. The days were no better than the nights where your life is essentially put on hold. Your choices on-call were either to be tethered to your home for an entire week never too far away from any Wi-Fi connection or lugging your laptop everywhere you went in case you got “the call”. Holidays were even worse. At any moment your family time, cooking, gift giving, football game or especially drinking could be interrupted by your mobile going off like a little cheer destroying timebomb. When you have pardon yourself from whatever fun you were having (or sober up) in order to TRY and fix something which wasn’t your fault in the first place!

I got off pretty easy when I was on-call. It was 11pm on a Friday and I happened to still be up when the “bat phone” went off. The developer who was also on-call described the issue we were having. Apparently, one of automated jobs was failing because of duplicates of the entry in the table where it was sucking data from. We ran a quick query and found the duplicates but there was no indication which was the correct entry (shocker, right?) To be fair the dev I was working with didn’t know anymore than I did about the job that was supposed to run but decided to ask me, “Which one do you think it is?” Well, how the hell should I know?? At that point I made an educated guess. When I say “educated guess” I really meant do I cut the red wire or the blue wire. I told the developer to delete the bottom entry and rerun the job. My logic was the bottom entry was older assuming the top entry was newer and causing the job to fail. I had a 50/50 shot at being right or bringing the whole system down. Luckily, we cut the right wire, and the job ran successfully.

Needless to say, a few short weeks later I was looking for a new job. I was not cut out to be part of the “digital bomb squad”. I’ll leave the wire cutting to the professionals.

“There’s the door.”

In a former job of mine I attended an IT All Hands meeting where they announced starting at the beginning of the new year the whole department will be on an on-call rotation. Immediately hands went up with a myriad of questions. Will be trained on the products we’ll be supporting? No. Will we be compensated for our time after hours? No. Will we get a company phone to use for on-call? No. Where does it say in our job descriptions that we have to be on-call? Right here (pointing at a vague one sentence in all our job descriptions.) After all our questions were NOT answered the manager presenting this new burden to our jobs ended with this, “If you don’t like it? There’s the door.” In the weeks to come we lost 25% of the personnel in our department.

There was a time where “There’s the door” was a threat. During that era workers were limited in their options and I they chose the door they could wind up unemployed indefinitely. But now a days this is an idle threat by a boss who doesn’t realize if the employee chooses the door it opens to the entire world. Remote work has opened an enormous number of opportunities for workers. These doors are not just open to digital workers either. Manual labor, service industry etc. all have positions to fill and are more than willing to take on more help. No longer do workers have to stay in a job with long hours, horrible bosses, lousy work environments and poor wages. They can pretty much go wherever they want, and its high time bosses get on board with that notion!

Recently our team hired a couple of VERY junior developers right out of school. These kids have no job experience at all, and chances are never had to deal with real world consequences for not getting your work done. Being GREEN developers, they were still ramping up and completed minimal work in their first sprint. I can only imagine being new at the job they didn’t want to screw up or tell anyone they didn’t know something. Especially our lead developer who just assumes anyone is stupid right out of the gate then treats them as such or our boss who has all the warmth of a frozen fish stick. Needless to say, our retrospective didn’t go well where our boss put up a general warning, “If you’d rather not participate on the team, we can have a conversation about that.” Which was basically a watered-down version of “…there’s the door.”  One of our junior developers quit that afternoon and the other was on the edge of leaving. I understood where my boss was coming from, work wasn’t getting done and he would have to explain to his boss the two people HE HIRED weren’t up for the challenge yet. But he also shouldn’t have been surprised when one of his junior developers whom he hired quit after his little ultimatum. It’s time for management to realize it’s a whole new world out there. Your intimidation and measly threats of forcing people into the office, monitoring their laptops to see how productive they are or telling people, “If you don’t like it…” You’ll be left in an empty office with no one to push around anymore. It gets lonely in the high tower.

Silos: Not just for nuclear warheads anymore.

The other night I was having dinner with some friends I used to work with in IT at another company a while back. Among the talk of kids, mortgages, prostates, and retirement one of them confesses he had been recently laid off. The news threw most of us for a loop because he’s a good guy and was very competent at what he did. But apparently that wasn’t good enough for the new company he had recently started at because on his annual review basically the only feedback he received was, “be better.” Unfortunately, my friend wasn’t given much of a chance to “be better” at his new job because he had been so siloed at his old job.

In the corporate world that’s known as being “siloed”. It’s pretty much a career killer in any industry but especially IT where you can only hope that point to retire from that company or get laid off with a nice severance and a stipend for retraining. In IT the expiration date for staying at any one job is 3-5 years then you need to move on. Any longer than that you’re not learning anything new (unless your company is technologically progressive, most aren’t) or you become stuck in a rut knowing one thing for one company but they keep throwing money at you so you can’t leave. Usually if you’ve been at a company that long any move will seem like a step down financially. Unfortunately, this is a trap we all fall into at one point in our careers.

I’ve seen this happen to people in IT or any sort of tech job where they become so good at one thing as time goes on, that’s all they know how to do. A shining example of this was when I worked for a company (we’ll call it the “Big Yellow Box”) where generation after generation learned how to do one thing, do it well and for this one company. But as we know the world only spins forward, not backwards and the “Big Yellow Box” was not keeping up with the times. Soon those generations who became good at one thing for one company found themselves out of a job. Some of the laid off got lucky and continued doing the same thing they had done for years but for a different company. That generation shift their knowledge and skills from the “Big Yellow Box” to their overseas competitor the “Little Green Box”.  Others were not so lucky. Many remained unemployed for quite a while until some bottom feeding corporation came along offering them new jobs, training for half their old salaries and vacations promising them they would not be laid off. These poor souls had no choice. Anything looks good when you’re desperate.

Recently I avoided being “siloed” by a company (not so much a bottom feeder but close) I was working for a contractor. This company not only seem to embrace the concept of siloing but also seemed stuck in 1989. They had surfed their name in the industry for years, so they never felt the need to change or were just afraid. They gave the illusion of “progression” with a ping pong table in the cafeteria and business casual. But they still weren’t on board working in Agile/SCRUM and as a contractor I wasn’t allowed to sit with the general populus. My “desk” was basically a card table stuck at the end of the row where the REAL employees got to sit. Despite my peasant-like surroundings, I still did my job. Eventually my boss took notice and encouraged me to apply for a full-time opening they had. After careful consideration, I quickly declined her offer. For the past year I had been working at an office throw away table in Siberia forced to use Waterfall and QA web pages which looked like they developed on a Mac SE in Koala. I recognized the signs of “siloing” and ejected before I fell in. Not everyone is as lucky and unfortunately, they fall deeper into the silo.

A friendly warning to those out there who are comfortable in their jobs right now. GET OUT! We are not living in 1956, loyalty has gone the way of the dinosaur and get use to the idea you are going to retire from the same company you started at. In the immortal words of Dory, “Just keep swimming.”

"Who wants to be a supervisor?"

Like with any other service industry worker, a Technical Support Representative is someone you want to handle with care. Much like a server who could spit in your food if you piss them off a Tech. Support Rep. could banish you to the endless maze of voice prompts with one slip of the tongue.

I’m still amazed there are people out in this world who still think the service industry is there for them to use as their personal toilet. They are clueless to the power dynamic they have walked into. The people you’re dumping on are the ones who handle your food, your drinks, repair your car, answer your endless STUPID questions or fix your technical problems. It’s sort like handing an arsonist an unlit match then calling him an asshole. How do you think that’s going to end?

During my unfortunate incarceration on the technical support line, it would be almost a daily occurrence that someone would want to speak with a supervisor. This could be for any number of reasons; they didn’t like the answer they were given, or they had to wait too long to get a “real person.” Little did they know by the third hour of being on the phones any shred of a “real person” no longer existed in any of the representatives. In one case a customer wanted to speak to a supervisor because we dared put an expiration date on a coupon that came with their printer.

Most of the time the disturbed caller would just want to hear another voice because they’re tired of hearing the one which is giving them the CORRECT answer. So, we would provide them with another voice, a “supervisor” of sorts. Most of the time our supervisor was not available (she was also well-known “office ghost.”) When she wasn’t around whomever had the “hot customer” (yes, people that’s how you’re referred to in our systems with scrolling red lettered banner as if to the next poor soul know they were entering a mine field) would stand on their chair and announce, “Who wants to be a supervisor!?” At that time whoever was free would take the call from the poor tech. rep. who had been enduring whatever annoying “mouth breather” was on the other end of the line. Once the call was transferred to the “supervisor” a possibly explosive scenario turned into a Jekyll and Hyde situation. When the “supervisor” reluctantly picks up the line and says, “How may I help you?” the customer’s tone changes so fast you’d think you were being pranked by your fellow reps. By that time the supposedly “irate” customer is so full of sugar and spice and everything nice it’s a small wonder the “supervisor” doesn’t come out of the call with a cavity. In the end all that matters is the customer is satisfied and we’re rid of them.

People who work in any service industry are for the most part overworked and underpaid. A very small percentage of them want to be there. Most of the time it’s a matter of survival and they need the money. I was asked in an interview once, “Why do you want to work in technical support?” I replied, “No one really WANTS to work in technical support. There is not a person out there dreaming of a career where you’re leashed to a phone 8 hours a day while a nearly endless parade of annoyed (and often ignorant) people call to dump on you or personally blame you for their problems. All while someone in management controls when you get to go to the bathroom.”

These are, as a friend’s mother described as “soul destroying” jobs. The only benefit we have in these service positions is that we hold all the cards. We control how and when you get your problem resolved. So, before you decide to call in then get on your tight-assed high horse and unload whatever shit you have bottled up onto us, THINK! Remember, we could not care less what your issue is and by the time you get to us you’re just one of thousands of irritating voices we’ve heard that day! And know that after we’ve solved your insignificant problem you’ve become the butt of SO many jokes at one of our many WELL-EARNED happy hours. All we’ll remember of you is how you treated us and whether or not we had to gleefully banish you to phone prompt HELL! Which will buy us an hour of much needed peace. At which time we’re either downing a large amount of ibuprofen or updating our resumes. Either of which will dull the pain until the next call rolls in and we say those immortal words, “How may I help you?”

A.I. Boss

There’s a big hullaballoo going around now about artificial intelligence and how it impacts many corners of our culture. A.I. (as it’s commonly called) has the ability to create art, write college essays and in some cases give “emotional” responses to questions. This concerns some because it removes the human aspect from things like painting a picture or writing a poem. In some cases, it is difficult to determine whether whatever piece art or writing we are looking at was created man or machine. This is how I feel when I interact with my boss.

To be fair he has not been in the position of my boss for that long but so far, the interactions I’ve had with him have me questioning his reality. So far, any face-to-face meetings or even just audio have been few or far between. Most of the time whatever meeting we have set up gets rescheduled or cancelled altogether. When we do have meetings either as a team or 1-on-1 he doesn’t have an agenda or barely talks at all. There are a lot of canned phrases tossed around like, “What’s on your minds?” or “I should look into that.” This makes me wonder if there is an actual human on the other side. Video meetings aren’t much better. Usually when you get the whole team on a video call you see people fidgeting or paying attention to something else on their screen while still listening. But when my boss is on screen there’s not a lot of motion at all except with the occasional eye blink or if he moves to changes the background on his display. The times he does speaking he’s almost always looking down so we can’t see his mouth move while he gives us the same canned responses, we’ve all heard a million times before. I imagine their programming must be breaking down because just recently he’s gotten into the habit of scheduling a meeting and then not showing up. A few minutes after the meeting has started, we’ll get a message like, “I’m running late. Please start the meeting without me.” Which seems like the A.I. equivalent of a “404-Page Not Found” error.

There have been a couple of occasions when I have seen and met my boss in person. But I’m not buying it. I feel like I’m interacting with a Disney animatronic creation programmed to give canned responses and move “realistically” but has all the human warmth of a cinderblock. I guess it could be worse. I could have ended up with a boss who was actually interested (before issues, if any, pop-up) in my work or who was curious about what I was doing. Then I’d never get anything done.

Boo! "Casper" the Office Ghost.

We all have one in our office. That person who is never in their cube, doesn’t respond to IM’s or takes a week to ten days to reply to emails. You usually catch sight of them out of the corner of your eye as they rush down the hall laptop in hand heading toward an “urgent meeting.” Or you lock eyes with them through closing elevators doors. If you do FINALLY get a face to face with them, they don’t have time to talk because they need to “put out a fire” somewhere. As they dash away from you clutching their trusty laptop piled on top of some suspicious looking folders, they ask you to send them an email, IM or text to discuss the issue. This my friends are what’s known as the “office ghost.”

When I was working technical support for a well-known camera company (which shall remain nameless) we had two variations of the “office ghost.” In most cases we had your standard apparition but then we had one which I would classify as an “office poltergeist.” This was an “office ghost’ whom we rarely saw but when they did make their presence known by creating as much havoc (and more work for us) as possible before disappearing again.

On the technical line we were often called to work a B-shift from 11am to 7pm to cover the west coast. Usually, it would be two or three of us there to cover the phones and it was pretty manageable most of the time. But one evening the flood gates opened and it seemed as if everyone west of the Mississippi was calling with some issue or another. This particular shift the “office poltergeist” was working with us. They apparently were there to catch on some paperwork and to lend a hand if we absolutely needed them. Well, WE DID! So, we reluctantly asked them to please hop on and take some calls to help reduce the forty-five people waiting in the queue. Of course, they were happy to assist (they always are) as soon as they were done with some paperwork. We swear their “paperwork” was basically the sound of them shuffling paper on their desk while surfing the web. Eventually they got on the phones and their idea of “helping out” was to tell the client we were very busy and asking them to call back later. In some cases, this is after the person had been on hold for more than twenty minutes. Needless to say, we asked them to log off the phones. Soon after logging off their line the “office poltergeist” vanished.

Regardless what variety “office ghost” you have roaming your halls they all have something in common. The only people who seem to see them with any consistency is management. They seem to appear at every meeting, employee event, team builder what have you and always within a couple of feet of whatever manager needs to see them. As always, they make the presences known management by dropping some sort of gagging bit of manure on why they LOVE working there or they’ll toss out a “Go team!” then scarf down whatever free food is provided and PUFF they’re gone. The management never asks where they’ve gone. They just assume they’ve gone off to attend to some “emergency” which they themselves don’t want to deal with. But those of us who deal with specter on a daily basis no better.

The only way to truly exercise the “office ghost” is to hope they move to a different department or better yet they go haunt another company. Until that time comes, we learn to coexist with them wishing that one day when they disappear in a puff of annoying smoke when ask to do some work, they stay gone.