Over Time

It's been a long, long week, and it's only Monday.

Last week was a killer - 81 hours on the clock! And that's just the amount of time spent at the office. Today will only be another 12 or so, but that's the way it goes when one is doing two jobs at once.

I'm still getting the hang of the 'new' job, and mostly what I'm getting is the sense of pointlessness of all the statusing and metrics-oriented activities that this job entails. Or, at least, those activities that some people seem to associate with this particular job.

I consider a 'Tech Lead' job to be one in which a Technical person leads other Technical persons (aka engineers) on the One True Path to Enlightenment - getting the work done so the product does what is supposed to do. That doesn't have anything to do with sitting in meetings listening to people go on and on about budgets and schedules and forecasts and Earned Value and other accountantly terms.

The True Facts of this job are that there is no money in the budget and no schedule left and still tons of work to do. All the worrying and fretting in the world won't change those facts. Yet some of these management types sit in these meetings worrying and fretting about the financial decisions as though they have some relative importance. The only decision that needs to be made is, are we going to finish this project, or are we going to stop?

If we're going to keep going, then they just need to shut up, get out of the way, and let us get our work done. Spending six hours out of an eight-hour day in meetings is not how things get done!

But until those little 'issues' get fixed, it looks like I'll be spending roughly three-quarters of my day twiddling my thumbs instead of fixing and testing code, which explains why I'm still here at midnight - trying to get something done!