in reply to CVS history woes

I have two pieces of advice. First is the oft-stated, "there's more to a job than pay." You need to decide, based on where you are in life, whether the stability and pay of the current job is worth the damage to your psyche or not. Or if you can just learn to let it go, lessening the damage. Which leads me to my next piece of advice.

Don't sweat the small stuff. And the corollary: it's all small stuff. I had a manager who really could not see past the next release. There was rarely any time set aside for improving things to make things cheaper, yet there was consistantly a cry to do so. So what I did was present my case to my manager, and when (not if - it was pretty much a sure thing) he said "no", I not only dropped it, but I refused to do it. If they want to pay more for this stuff down the road for a minor savings now, that's their business, not mine. I'm not a manager, I'm not paid to make those resource decisions. Therefore, I didn't. I told them my honest opinion on what they were doing, what the cost was today, and what the cost was tomorrow. And they invariably picked the short-sighted option. But, if anything, it merely has increased my pay as they reward my honesty. It hasn't reduced my pay at all. Although it really should be reducing their pay, I don't think it does, because no one really gets what these decisions are costing them.

And that's really the bottom line. Though I try to educate them on long-term costs of solutions, they never seem to see those costs show up. They're there in larger sizings to accomplish work, but they don't see those larger sizings as based on the failure to do things right two years ago. They see those sizings as the cost to do the next incremental thing. And it's their business to run into the ground. I just keep my resume up to date, and focus on what's really important to me: my parents (and in-laws), my siblings (and the siblings-in-law), their kids, and, most importantly, my wife and our unborn child. Everything else is small stuff.

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Re^2: CVS history woes
by Anonymous Monk on Jul 29, 2006 at 05:42 UTC

    I'm not a manager, I'm not paid to make those resource decisions.

    Right, you're a programmer - shouldn't this be a programmer decision? Maybe I'm being a bit extreme there but where is the line that a decision goes from being a technical one to a resource one? Is it what modules we decide to use? Is it using cuddled elses vs non cuddled elses? If the management doesn't set the boundaries there it seems like it's left open for the programmer to decide.

    Thank you for your advice - it makes a lot of sense. The only thing that boggles my mind is that they hired me because I'm an expert and I'm good at what I do - yet when I take initiative, the boss freaks out. Most everyone there has been there for 6 years and has fallen into the bit rot hole, and can't get out. I guess maybe it's because while things may be wacky, they work 90% of the time. Then there's the 20% of the time that their code explodes on a rollout to a multi-hundred-million dollar per year system. How much does that cost? Your guess is probably as good as mine.

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      if ($self -> is_principal() || $self -> is_major_shareholder()) {
  $self -> concerned_with_long_term_costs(1);
} else {
  $self -> concerned_with_long_term_costs(0);
}

if (!$self -> concerned_with_long_term_costs()) {
  $self -> defer_to_boss(1);
}

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[d/l]
      Thank you for your advice - it makes a lot of sense. The only thing that boggles my mind is that they hired me because I'm an expert and I'm good at what I do - yet when I take initiative, the boss freaks out.
      Have you ever lived somewhere where the new roomate decides to streamline the way the kitchen operates, and you can't find anything for six months?

      I just want to suggest that what's going on here may not be entirely a technical issue, but a social one. Your boss may be using CVS history as an excuse, when really it's his own mental flexibility that's a problem: if every new guy that walks in the door rearranges everything -- and every new guy wants to, that's a given -- then he's never going to know where anything is.

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