The “spreadsheet mentality” sucks, and kills the efficacy of jobs
The sweet inferno of following a process that will take you from one wiki page to the next, then coming back, with no clear checklist of completeness and no chance for you to validate ; rampant aconymisms with no explanations that assume global understanding of all the particularities of obscure systems as if you built them, and assume knowledge of poorly defined organizations and processes with unclear responsibilities. Any way to get help is hidden as deep as possible behind tickets that will never get processed and distribution lists that redirect you to channels where people just send you to the unfathomably bad doc you where following or redirect you to ticketing systems again.<p>Onboarding to an organization takes you through four different systems you need to onboard without explaining the order, require prior entry creation in another system that isn&#x27;t documented or explained until, eventually, you fail and have to start the process again. It requires you to provide ids you can&#x27;t figure whence to pull from. Onboarding to another system requires translation in a JSON file, but then asks to manually re-enter the same data in another web-app by manually pulling it out from JSON file. 4 entries × 37 different languages, with no way of automation. Onboarding to system A takes 8 weeks. Onboarding to process B takes 8 weeks from the PO approval. You need an IO number before you can start the process, then you need to figure how to author in the format they expect (they tell you the format but not how to author it). Then they&#x27;ll ask questions that you, very honestly, need to be a lawyer to answer. You&#x27;ll ask the lawyer, who&#x27;s out of office and whose responder tells you to chat to A FUCKING BOT whose job is redirect you to incomplete documentation, which won&#x27;t be able to answer your specific question anyhow. Might as well redirect you to a university&#x27;s home page for you to start your own lawyer degree at this stage. If you miss a checkbox, you start anew and it&#x27;s 8 weeks. Then you finally get the greenlight and want to toggle the feature flag on. It must be done progressively, in increasing %, environment by environment, with approval from some random team you don&#x27;t need <i>at each step</i>. Your feature is separate and will target only 3 of your customers? Doesn&#x27;t matter, have to follow the same process.<p>People who are supposed to help you are either too busy dealing with their own administrative nightmares, too bad or lazy to do so, or already burnt out and will let you do the effort. They&#x27;ll be here to tell you you fucked up don&#x27;t worry.<p>You keep getting automated alerts from 5 different systems (I&#x27;m not even exaggerating), for systems that more often than not don&#x27;t belong to you. It takes an average 1 to 2 hours to understand these tickets, then you enter the binary tree of 1) finding the rightful owner, make them accept it&#x27;s theirs, and once in a while even manage to get the thing reassign if such a process was ever considered in the first place 2) or realizing it is correct, and trying to figure what needs to be done through documentation that are as bad as can be, prioritize it (kidding, it&#x27;s always top priority and needs to be done yesterday), and figure how to mark the thing as complete to get closure 3) find out that the alert is wrong or unjustified and start fighting the administration again to provide evidence, justification, gather the right approvals on form 22A from your skip-skip-skip-skip-skip-skip level manager, get it certified by the office of cries and complaints, which finally opens the door of the office of furniture and casual offerings on floor -12b, where you&#x27;ll need to sacrifice a goat under moonshine while standing on your left arm. I spent 3 weeks telling a security &quot;expert&quot; that the alert asking me to add flags to gcc was a false positive, considering that our project is in .net.<p>Information comes from 4 different media (mail, chat, some random announcement website, and un-recorded meetings), and it is assumed you saw, know and will abide to the new policy change as soon as generic communication has been dropped in the sea of information.<p>Meanwhile you&#x27;re still expected to do your job, except that your perception of said job is very different from what the organization is expecting from you. I just got escalated to my partner because I did not fill in the proper tracking fields in a ticket. Except I did. But I dared answer that person directly in the comment she left me within the ticket, while she was expecting me to come to an &quot;office hours&quot; meeting to tell her about this (it&#x27;s more convenient to have all the people you expect stuff from in a room at once rather than having to deal with individuals, right?). So she didn&#x27;t see it, and assumed I didn&#x27;t do it. Disregard that half of these fields are irrelevant to our cases because we don&#x27;t work on the codebase they&#x27;re supposed to be tracking. People whose job description it is to help you will still not, because they found a loop-hole in an organization that doesn&#x27;t make any sense, and no matter how much effort I&#x27;ll spend trying to fix that will ever land.<p>Then there&#x27;s this random dying system that everyone hates maintaining because it&#x27;s so old it keeps triggering deprecation alerts, security alerts and so on. Every change is a refactoring and migration project. It&#x27;s yours now, we decided. Code has been written by 16 different people who moved on to greener fields, nothing makes sense, 80% of code is deprecated but you don&#x27;t dare deleting it because coverage is so low, and build somehow fails when you remove it. It would only take a month or two to go through the code base and make it sane, but you get denied that &quot;budget&quot; because it doesn&#x27;t match any of the &quot;OKRs&quot; which solely focus on acquiring more and more paying users. The thing is used by a handful of people, and when ultimately, after months of moaning, you manage to get approval to deprecate the whole thing, then zombies get out of their graves and start trying to tank the project on the hotel that they wrote a line of code in it in 1997, and they&#x27;ll see to it that this shining marvel of engineering will outlive them.<p>Death by thousand administrative cuts.<p>What makes me dream? Unity. Complete docs that tell you in one go what you need to do. A single alerting system. Empathy, people who actually listen to you and try to help. Processes that allow the individual to decide whether that applies to them, accountability if you fuck up.