Work
Today has probably been my worst day of work, ever. I know it’s probably exaggerating to say that. I mean there was the day in September ‘03 when I made a couple of mistakes to the amusement of everyone else, but when I was new then and people laugh at you, it can be pretty hard.
Today though just seems like the culmination of all the bad stuff that happens in the office. I basically code, all on my own (I have had people help me on occasion, but I’d say 98% of it is my own work) one of our core systems. Little did I know when I took this on how much work it would be. The initial release in March last year went well. People were very pleased with how easy to use it was and how reliable it was compared to it’s predecessor. Then we needed some new features for new clients, so I worked on those, and they were delivered on time, and with few problems. More and more people were put on the system. I’ll admit I was a bit apprehensive about the rate the company put clients onto the system. After all, this was the first system I’d created, and I wasn’t sure how it would cope with 100s of users. Would it still work?
Seemingly it did. However, as is always the way, the more people used it, the more people used it in unexpected ways, exposing things that caused in unexpected results. So they needed fixing. Unfortunately during this time, new features needed to be implemented. This is seemingly not a system that likes to stand still.
In the main though, that’s ok, I tried to write this system in a flexible way, so it’s easily extendable. So new feature requests are always coming in, and I try and cope with them. That’s the problem though, I try and cope. I just can’t seem to do it anymore. I get demands (and they really feel like demands) on when the next version will be out, why isn’t this bug fixed, why haven’t you changed this, if we want this feature, how long will it take?
Planning seemingly doesn’t figure in the scheme of things anymore, so it’s constant knee jerk reactions to a “crisis” (which is usually because somebody made an “assumption” at some point and never asked those in the know about the system). The crisis more often than not turns out to be 1 client out of 350 on the system having a problem with something.
The result of all this stuff, and it’s incomplete because I seem to have lost the ability to concentrate, is that I’m just not happy doing this job anymore. Problem is, I need the money, so I have to stay, and I don’t know what else I want to do for a job.
This is the reason I work in support and not development!