The workday
Jan. 15th, 2009 04:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
garoteI woke up to a call from one of my three managers, saying that testing was suspended. I fixed the problem over VPN then rushed to work in the van in order to watch testing.
From the moment I arrived there, the work was fast and furious. I spent half my day in the lab shepherding various projects, and during that time, activity swirled around me, as people moved equipment, configured machines, and asked questions. It was gratifying to be such a useful and important person. Everyone around me seemed to know that the lab was primarily mine - that I was the person to come to for permission to change something, or for advice on fixing a problem - and in every case, I could help. It was a very good day. I got a lot of "thank you"s today.
During my downtime I reflected on my position there, and on the phrase "lab manager". Managing this lab is completely different from managing a lab at a university, or a library, or even in some other company. In fact, about the only thing it has in common is the literal meaning: There is a lab involved. Everyone who walks in the door (and for that you need a security clearance) is a motivated learner, with a purpose and a need to be fulfilled, and is absolutely uninterested in wasting time. And they all understand that the person "in charge" of the lab has a skillset - and probably a grade of pay - equal to theirs.
Well, almost all of them understand. There was one exception. A new hire who came onto the scene working for an adjacent department, who needed to get some testing done but swore that he never, ever wanted to get lab access, because then he would be physically responsible for testing machines. He was convinced that someone else - someone beneath him probably - would be taking care of that, and taking care of his code as it ran on the machines.
In my first few conversations with him I caught this air of superiority. He'd come looking for "the lab manager" and been steered to me, and must have assumed I was some poor dimwit whose day consisted of jabbing "reset" buttons and blowing dust off cables with canned air. Eventually he figured it out: I wasn't just the guy who repaired and arranged the machines. I was the architect, solitary programmer, and primary maintainer of the testing system that drove them -- and drove hundreds of machines elsewhere, in other buildings. To make the point clear I eventually gave him a tour of the lab, including the server closet, with the RAID arrays and the databases and the build machines. A collection of gear more expensive than a house in the suburbs. I described all the pieces of software I'd built on them and how they interconnected. After that his tone changed. He learned that no one here is average. The average people get buried and quit.
Last year, a new hire in the department broke down in tears when we were standing alone in her office. She said she'd been given an impossible workload, and was unable to learn fast enough to come up to speed. People were arguing about designs, features, and architecture all around her, and she couldn't even parse most of it. She said that taking the job here had been a mistake; it was going to drive her crazy and ruin her home life.
I gently shut the door to the office and sat down across the desk from her. I explained what I'd been told when I first started: We're running a marathon, not a race. Somehow, she'd never been given this speech, so I gave it. We each need to learn how to pace ourselves, and we need to be assertive not just about what we can do, but what we can't, so we can establish that pace and make others aware of it. When someone comes to you with a project, an accurate answer about how long it may take you - even if it's longer than they prefer - is a thousand times better than blind acceptance followed by catastrophe. And that's a big problem for some people. They struggle to be honest about their shortcomings and announce their mistakes preemptively.
She seemed to listen. She stuck with the job, and a couple months later she seemed a lot more comfortable. She still has a tendency to overwork herself - almost accidentally - but that's typical here I guess.
Her ordeal, and my encounter with the guy who disdained "lab managers", made me realize something. Many of the new hires are coming from crappy work environments, out in the world. In their old places, if they had claimed their mistakes, they would have been happily crucified by their peers. To earn a raise, they would have needed to make their case to disinterested managers who had no idea what was hard and what was easy, and were going by who claimed the most credit in big meetings or in their last self-evaluation.
I think the real reason this is on my mind is because it's ongoing confirmation that this is the best job I could possibly have, especially in this craptastic economy. But despite that, I'm feeling an urge to travel, to try something completely different, to turn my life upside-down somehow while I'm still young and tough enough to accomplish it. Just to keep things interesting.
From the moment I arrived there, the work was fast and furious. I spent half my day in the lab shepherding various projects, and during that time, activity swirled around me, as people moved equipment, configured machines, and asked questions. It was gratifying to be such a useful and important person. Everyone around me seemed to know that the lab was primarily mine - that I was the person to come to for permission to change something, or for advice on fixing a problem - and in every case, I could help. It was a very good day. I got a lot of "thank you"s today.
During my downtime I reflected on my position there, and on the phrase "lab manager". Managing this lab is completely different from managing a lab at a university, or a library, or even in some other company. In fact, about the only thing it has in common is the literal meaning: There is a lab involved. Everyone who walks in the door (and for that you need a security clearance) is a motivated learner, with a purpose and a need to be fulfilled, and is absolutely uninterested in wasting time. And they all understand that the person "in charge" of the lab has a skillset - and probably a grade of pay - equal to theirs.
Well, almost all of them understand. There was one exception. A new hire who came onto the scene working for an adjacent department, who needed to get some testing done but swore that he never, ever wanted to get lab access, because then he would be physically responsible for testing machines. He was convinced that someone else - someone beneath him probably - would be taking care of that, and taking care of his code as it ran on the machines.
In my first few conversations with him I caught this air of superiority. He'd come looking for "the lab manager" and been steered to me, and must have assumed I was some poor dimwit whose day consisted of jabbing "reset" buttons and blowing dust off cables with canned air. Eventually he figured it out: I wasn't just the guy who repaired and arranged the machines. I was the architect, solitary programmer, and primary maintainer of the testing system that drove them -- and drove hundreds of machines elsewhere, in other buildings. To make the point clear I eventually gave him a tour of the lab, including the server closet, with the RAID arrays and the databases and the build machines. A collection of gear more expensive than a house in the suburbs. I described all the pieces of software I'd built on them and how they interconnected. After that his tone changed. He learned that no one here is average. The average people get buried and quit.
Last year, a new hire in the department broke down in tears when we were standing alone in her office. She said she'd been given an impossible workload, and was unable to learn fast enough to come up to speed. People were arguing about designs, features, and architecture all around her, and she couldn't even parse most of it. She said that taking the job here had been a mistake; it was going to drive her crazy and ruin her home life.
I gently shut the door to the office and sat down across the desk from her. I explained what I'd been told when I first started: We're running a marathon, not a race. Somehow, she'd never been given this speech, so I gave it. We each need to learn how to pace ourselves, and we need to be assertive not just about what we can do, but what we can't, so we can establish that pace and make others aware of it. When someone comes to you with a project, an accurate answer about how long it may take you - even if it's longer than they prefer - is a thousand times better than blind acceptance followed by catastrophe. And that's a big problem for some people. They struggle to be honest about their shortcomings and announce their mistakes preemptively.
She seemed to listen. She stuck with the job, and a couple months later she seemed a lot more comfortable. She still has a tendency to overwork herself - almost accidentally - but that's typical here I guess.
Her ordeal, and my encounter with the guy who disdained "lab managers", made me realize something. Many of the new hires are coming from crappy work environments, out in the world. In their old places, if they had claimed their mistakes, they would have been happily crucified by their peers. To earn a raise, they would have needed to make their case to disinterested managers who had no idea what was hard and what was easy, and were going by who claimed the most credit in big meetings or in their last self-evaluation.
I think the real reason this is on my mind is because it's ongoing confirmation that this is the best job I could possibly have, especially in this craptastic economy. But despite that, I'm feeling an urge to travel, to try something completely different, to turn my life upside-down somehow while I'm still young and tough enough to accomplish it. Just to keep things interesting.
