9 to 5

Just as I was getting ready to leave work today, a friend knocked on the door. The conversation went something like this:

friend: i come to say good bye.

me: what? you are leaving? where?

friend: <some other place>

friend: you didn’t know? the news has been around for about a week.

me: what? why?

friend: <pause>

me: you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.

friend: live issues.

friend: it’s going to be an easy job.

friend: 9 to 5.

friend: i want to spend more time with my family.

me: i see.

I know he’s not struggling in term of performance. In fact he’s been busy on a high profile project. I guess he just got tired of it so he fired the company and left. Good for him .

It actually hit close to home on me as well. Is this what I really want to do? What do I get from this? Certainly not a lot of money. I bet he didn’t take to much of a pay cut if not actually a raise. Hell the benefit may even be much better. Satisfaction? Contention?

ps. Just because we were talking for a little while, I got a couple of instant messages on my terminal. Holy swinging chandelier trap, Batman! (Or as Admiral Ackbar said more succinctly, “It’s a trap!”) I should have left earlier. Instead, I needed to spend extra half hour to fire off few replies. Why do some people like to forward questions at the end of Friday like they’re trying to shed off problems? Hey, that thing did not have anything to do with me and you knew it or should have known it.

neverending crap

I had a fix to a bug on a released product. Our particular product was not defective per se but another product (from the same mines) has a problem when interacting with ours so we also have to modify our product. After months of testings, design changes and multiple beta tests, we think we’re ready to release this.

After I sent out this change to be packaged, I was notified by a fellow miner about a bug on the part I was working on. I looked at it and to my relieve I found that it’s fixed. Good.

BUT…., I noticed another thing wrong with the fix. Shoot. Releasing a broken fix is a big no-no around here. Panic time… OK, trace back where the fix has gone to. It is still in packaging. Not to bad, we can still pull this out. Now I’ll just fix it one more time.

Nope, it’s not over yet. While testing this new fix, I found another problem. I am sure I’ve never seen this before. After many minutes, it turns out it’s caused by another fix by another miner that’s also on the way to be released. It’s a vicious trail. OK, notified the guy and resent mine to be packaged again. Oh and for good measure ask the boss to review the changes again.

Everything was now cool, right? Noooo! fast forward a few days. My fellow miner contacted me said the his problem is now fixed but he’s looking at an anomaly on a feature. We looked at it and we went back full circle to my original fix. Another mistake! it’s like a gift that keeps on giving. So, back to square one. Back to testing cycle again and hopefully next week I can send it again for packaging.

So now I’ve almost gotten to the point where I don’t give a damn anymore. Someone once joked that this was going to define my career here on the mines. Now I think ironically that he may have been correct, for better or for worse.

Maybe I need a new career.

we are the monkeys banging on typewriters

I have been told from both QA and higher ups that we should help QA as much as possible on their work as they have limited resource(s).
Whew, I didn’t know I was working with unlimited development resources. We should have no problem at all then.

conveyor

Someone seems to have taken slight offense on something that I wrote on an email. The original email was not even directed to the said person but it turned out that person was related to the issue. I didn’t complain about anyone on my email. I just said that something was broken and needed fixing. Anyway, I replied saying sorry if said person took it that way yadda, yadda, yadda. I’m not too concerned about the whole thing and I have no hard feeling or anything.

The only thing that concerned me was whether what I wrote didn’t convey what I meant or even worse, it conveyed something I didn’t mean. I reread my email and asked someone on the original cc list of that email. We both agree that nothing was particularly derisive. Maybe my choice for words was not the best but definitely not disparaging in that context.