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Search - "crisis mode"
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- Launch the new version of the system I have been refactoring for 2 years and counting, then ceremoniously burn (literally) the legacy code as well as the cluster fuck of hardware it runs on.
- Decrease my stress + bus factor by bringing another up to speed on my code & the new version (his cluster fuck now).
- Pay attention to & take better care of health, my wrists in patricular.
- Find a mentor and mentor someone else.
- Get out of crisis management mode and find the time to write tuts, experiment and live a little.
- Find & join a local dev meetup, maybe make a local dev friend.
- Book leave and actually take it, preferabbly without having to take my laptop to the beach - actually, preferabbly at least have the choice to take a offline vacation.
- Sort through the drives containing ALL the code I have ever written, migrate the usefull interesting bits to Github.
Phew, that bit of self reflection was intense! I'm adding a cron to my server to sms & email me this rant in a year to remind me what hope looks like. -
Going into uni, the first thing I did (like many others) was to join an on campus organization (club/group). I made the choice of joining my unis publication. Little did I know 2 years ago that I had just joined the top most student magazine in this country. (Literally).
Honestly, I was excited. I was the first web developer that qualified that year, and within a year I was able to claim my position as the senior developer. It had been an uphill climb all the way, I was able to redesign the entire website and implement an insane amount of features as well as add both iOS and Android apps to the list of things I had done in a year.
I had loved everything I did, only when I was given my new position as senior dev did I see the reality of being in this magazine.. it's in total chaos. Every year we elect new editorial members (as old ones graduate) however the new ones have no idea how to run the magazine, they have literally declared that were in crisis mode. Being in an art school were all about creativity, and honestly, there is nothing creative about our magazine anymore.
Suddenly after two years I feel that my work no longer matters to them anymore. I have thought about quiting a million times now but they would take away my grant if I did (we get a subsidy for working for the magazine). I have two more years and I feel like absolute shit being in this magazine, my work is never credited and I am never mentioned either! While I am the reason they have a face on the internet, they never once have credited me. I don't feel like I belong in the team anymore. I feel like they only have me there is because they can't find a replacement nearly as good. (I'm sorry but I consider myself the best.)1 -
So I need your advice guys. Our team is in crisis mode right now because of a vendor's attempt to extort money out of us. So for the next 6 months I am going to be taken off development and made to do sysadmin work...which I hate.
There is another team at work that was trying to woo me over to their team, working in security...which I love.
So would it be a dick move to leave my struggling team that is trying to use a hammer as a screwdriver and do what makes me happy? Or should I be a good person and do work that makes me miserable and go home and drink every night instead?4 -
This literally happened in my current team, and I'm not even an experienced dev yet.
Incident happened like this :
Our team is working on a RCP based on eclipse plugins, which has a headless mode and a GUI mode. Now, in the GUI mode, my manager cum architect thought there are no need of user log files (long story) because the user can see the info on screen, whereas in the headless mode, she wanted me to print the logs onto the console and a log file as well.
Now it just so happened that our team had got a recent addition as a replacement to our lead developer (she left the company) who claimed she had 3 years of expertise and a masters degree, and she was assigned a task. The task was to format a custom file we were generating out of the product (basically dumping info in a file) in a human-readable format. Miss new-addition-masters-degree decided it would be a very good idea to redirect the standard java output stream to a file output stream ( which she used for generating the formatted file ) but somehow never realized that she needed to reset the output stream back to standard output.
Consequences were devastating. I wrote the logic for the logger ( yes, apparently any available logging mechanism won't do it, again, long story ) and had it printing to a file in tmp directory. The logs seemed to be working fine initially but after a few logs, specifically from the point where the formatter started working, all the logs got printed in the formatted file. And this file was supposed to be used by our clients to develop something on top of it. Naturally, I got the heat of it and then naturally, worried and nervous and curious and in a frenzied state of mind, I started debugging.
When I got to the actual fault, I seriously could not decide whether to cry or laugh or call up miss masters and scream at her. I decided to ask her about what the hell she had written and her answer was most of it was written by the developer she replaced, so she didn't know it would cause this much problem. Anyway, I fixed the leak after that and averted the catastrophe.
And that, fellow devs, is the story of how I solved a crisis in my first year at corporate.1 -
Whenever there's a crisis I immediately slow down.
Get calm. That has to be step one, as long as it takes. Then (usually) the crisis is actually no big deal and there's a simple solution, but you'll never find that during panic mode.1