There goes Tokyo, etc.
May. 14th, 2014 10:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hirezIt would appear that the last time I mentioned work here, I was mithering about shit-shovelling rather than doing any proper and/or interesting, er, work.
In an entirely unremarkable turn of events, my services to excrement relocation and associated manure redistribution have been fully recognised by the New Regime and it would seem I can look forward to fully committing myself to varieties of fertiliser spreading for the foreseeable $work future.
Or, in less pointedly pissed-off prose, the Ops team is getting a right shoeing and like naughty children we are to be split up across the class. Two 'web engineers'[1] and two 'sysadmins', which is rather a lot less than the six do-everything sorts we actually need/are. I also note that since we have provided our own technical leadership for the past eighteen months, in the face of the unusual amount of fanatical indifference, we are to be rewarded by, oh, more of the same. It would be quite nice, sometimes, to be challenged by management. Rather than them being management-challenged.
The short answer appears to be that the current $work Ops team are Seriously Fucking Good and that everyone else walking in the door is a complete bullshitter, unless they're already on ##infra-talk. And even then...
... So at Puppetcamp the other month, one of the talks was by a chap from $consultancy, who was giving it large about the wonderful things they'd been doing with MCollective. Obviously I was jolly keen to view his presentation so as to learn new things about the tools we are using quite heavily now.
You may imagine my mild embarrassment to discover that the thing the chap was most pleased with was a re-implemented version of some of my own code. Only attributed to someone else. Said embarrassment deepened when the rest of the team (and Matt, who hacked on it also) started actually waving their hands about and going 'I think you'll find...' and pointing at, er, me.
Bloke was jolly good about it, but still.
New Regime? So not all that. Not even slightly. You can mostly tell from the new set of alleged 'org' 'charts' that have been circulated. The charts for the bits of business they think they know about are all lots of wee boxes interconnected such that they look like the map from Jet Set Willy.
The IT org chart looks like a row of tombstones. It's like they went 'Oh, er, I don't know. Businessy things! Profit! Cloud!' and then wandered off for a lattechino and a ham roll.
(There's the Puppet2 rig, that I installed to the sound of indifference. The Puppet3 rig is thankfully a proper team effort, not least because we're using Gitlab for SCM. That I installed. We're also able to let the devs do their own deploys. Using code and system-wiring that I developed on my bloody own. There's also the wonky scalable Wormpress rig that I designed on the back of an envelope and the rest of the team implemented in circa three weeks. (because some bloody PM who can't even computer promised it to the board. And then came back and told us what she'd done.[2]) )
Unless you are deeply into devopsery and automation and CI/CD rigs, you're unlikely to even know if you should care about any of that, but any consultant the New Regime brings in will need to have presented at Velocity if they're not to be laughed from the building.
It's CV-polishing time.
[1] Are you fucking CHARTERED? No? The you are NOT A FUCKING ENGINEER. Fucking spod-boy PHP-fondlers calling themselves 'engineers' is the sign of a shit job for a shit employer. Fuck them, jointly and severally.
[2] That was an utter abomination, partly because it was designed on the back of an envelope and hacked together in three weeks, but also because it was built to be non-customisable, because the requirement was 'be able to spark up a wormpress blog without asking the Unix Ops team to do anything'. However, that got sold as 'it's just like wormpress and of course you can have it in purple with all these plugins...' Which, no.
In an entirely unremarkable turn of events, my services to excrement relocation and associated manure redistribution have been fully recognised by the New Regime and it would seem I can look forward to fully committing myself to varieties of fertiliser spreading for the foreseeable $work future.
Or, in less pointedly pissed-off prose, the Ops team is getting a right shoeing and like naughty children we are to be split up across the class. Two 'web engineers'[1] and two 'sysadmins', which is rather a lot less than the six do-everything sorts we actually need/are. I also note that since we have provided our own technical leadership for the past eighteen months, in the face of the unusual amount of fanatical indifference, we are to be rewarded by, oh, more of the same. It would be quite nice, sometimes, to be challenged by management. Rather than them being management-challenged.
The short answer appears to be that the current $work Ops team are Seriously Fucking Good and that everyone else walking in the door is a complete bullshitter, unless they're already on ##infra-talk. And even then...
... So at Puppetcamp the other month, one of the talks was by a chap from $consultancy, who was giving it large about the wonderful things they'd been doing with MCollective. Obviously I was jolly keen to view his presentation so as to learn new things about the tools we are using quite heavily now.
You may imagine my mild embarrassment to discover that the thing the chap was most pleased with was a re-implemented version of some of my own code. Only attributed to someone else. Said embarrassment deepened when the rest of the team (and Matt, who hacked on it also) started actually waving their hands about and going 'I think you'll find...' and pointing at, er, me.
Bloke was jolly good about it, but still.
New Regime? So not all that. Not even slightly. You can mostly tell from the new set of alleged 'org' 'charts' that have been circulated. The charts for the bits of business they think they know about are all lots of wee boxes interconnected such that they look like the map from Jet Set Willy.
The IT org chart looks like a row of tombstones. It's like they went 'Oh, er, I don't know. Businessy things! Profit! Cloud!' and then wandered off for a lattechino and a ham roll.
(There's the Puppet2 rig, that I installed to the sound of indifference. The Puppet3 rig is thankfully a proper team effort, not least because we're using Gitlab for SCM. That I installed. We're also able to let the devs do their own deploys. Using code and system-wiring that I developed on my bloody own. There's also the wonky scalable Wormpress rig that I designed on the back of an envelope and the rest of the team implemented in circa three weeks. (because some bloody PM who can't even computer promised it to the board. And then came back and told us what she'd done.[2]) )
Unless you are deeply into devopsery and automation and CI/CD rigs, you're unlikely to even know if you should care about any of that, but any consultant the New Regime brings in will need to have presented at Velocity if they're not to be laughed from the building.
It's CV-polishing time.
[1] Are you fucking CHARTERED? No? The you are NOT A FUCKING ENGINEER. Fucking spod-boy PHP-fondlers calling themselves 'engineers' is the sign of a shit job for a shit employer. Fuck them, jointly and severally.
[2] That was an utter abomination, partly because it was designed on the back of an envelope and hacked together in three weeks, but also because it was built to be non-customisable, because the requirement was 'be able to spark up a wormpress blog without asking the Unix Ops team to do anything'. However, that got sold as 'it's just like wormpress and of course you can have it in purple with all these plugins...' Which, no.
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no subject
Date: 2014-05-15 06:23 am (UTC)Had you thought of posting that to the new management, so as to see the fireworks ?
no subject
Date: 2014-05-15 06:42 am (UTC)It's a shame. A lot of what New Regime wants to do is more or less exactly what Ops have been talking about for, er, the last half-decade. They just seem to have decided to do it via handwave-and-powerpoint using business practices that were new and interesting in, er, 1997.
no subject
Date: 2014-05-15 06:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-05-15 07:16 am (UTC)Other than that, no. Looks to be the set of useless people jettisoned from Carphone Warehouse before they get found out in the merger.
no subject
Date: 2014-05-15 07:54 am (UTC)Mind you, I did just have a giant fried breakfast, so I may just be filled with unfounded metabolic optimism.
no subject
Date: 2014-05-15 09:56 am (UTC)On the other hand, even I can spot a massively dysfunctional relationship..
no subject
Date: 2014-05-15 07:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-05-19 05:45 am (UTC)Either that, or you could come back as a consultant for $HOW_MUCH?!? and no responsibility.
no subject
Date: 2014-05-19 06:56 am (UTC)