I’ve got about one more week of this current project then I’ll get my life back… I sure hope I never get another one of these.
See, the reason I don’t do government contract work anymore is that I don’t deal well with stress; I don’t like it and I want nothing to do with it. So I tend to take on lower paying jobs than the industry standard for what I do just to simply avoid it.
See, I’m old enough now to know that “stress free” in the job title is worth about $10k a year. So even if I’m making $1000 a month less than someone else in my field, at least I get to go home at night and enjoy the money I do make without being on call, having to take work home, being expected to put in 60 hour weeks. This is the whole reason I hired on where I work now, that and it’s a truly great group of people there.
Then this current project happened and I got shipped off to Broomfield for 3 months… Which has been something akin to being cast out of heaven: While being the guy in charge has it’s perks, managing the demons and getting everyone to stick to the torture schedule I created has been a real nightmare.
Humor aside it’s been hell, really. A short list of issues would include:
- The customer is clueless as far as software development is concerned.
- The product I was there to test back in February as of yesterday still can’t handle one tenth of the load it’s going to have to handle in production next month.
- I keep having to field complaints that “we aren’t doing our job”, which is testing, and I keep having to politically say that it’s due to their inability to create working code to test.
- The customer skipped functionality testing thinking that L&P testing would do the same thing, and has since discovered (as I told them) that it doesn’t.
- There are the constant requests for “reports” on the testing we cant do because nothing works.
- The fact that no one there can actually make it into the building for five consecutive days during the week as they all work from home, but when there is a deadline I’m expected to work ten hour days and weekends.
- The fact that because the company is on a cost center model there are no less than 15 departments, all trying to keep their jobs, involved in this project and none of them know that there are other departments involved.
- The overall manager of this project on the customer’s side was non-existent till two weeks ago, and once he realized he was in charge, still only makes it into the building 2-3 days a week.
- The data center the customer chose for this project is a bunch of clown shoes… The environment there has yet to work completely, and when they do manage to get a piece working we can’t test it because of some security issue or access failure.
- And on and on… I could write a book citing this one project as an example of everything you shouldn’t do to produce software.
It’s been hell. And it’s been my life for the last three months.
So, this is the reason I’ve just simply not been around for months now. But it will all be over soon and I’ll go back to my nice simple job of breaking software and web sites. 🙂
And with that I should head for work. Have a great day folks, I’ll try to as well.