chat

in the latter 3 years of my previous job i worked on development of 2 products that ended up being duds, one was canceled right after completion but before it hit the market and the other was released but there's no demand so they stopped further development immediately (which tmk is still the case).

This is always fun when you're working on "wholesale" (strictly in-org) projects, dump a ton of capital hours into something, and then it gets rugpulled right at the end of implementation because it turns out that the middle management ghoul who requested it never actually vetted the new automation process with the finance department stakeholders that it directly affects, and it turns out that the "automation" actually dumps a fuckton more manual work on them. And there are no consequences because the aforementioned middle management ghoul just retires a few months later anyway, after the poor sap who had to do all the development work -- and requirements re-analysis because the project "docs" were screenshots of XML pasted in a multi-tab Excel sheet -- missed like four holidays in a row AND I WILL NEVER GET THAT TIME BACK YOU SONS OF BITCHES

Every fucking year they pull this shit. I get handed some massive project near the beginning of the year, and then I keep getting pulled off of it in order to do random break-fix work on other shit that keeps breaking because we have no QA, no standards, no accountability, not even code reviews, and then October rolls around and it is suddenly the massive project from Q1 is The Most Important Thing Ever because the capital work order funding goes bye-bye on December 31st, so now it's motherfucking crunch time baybee, and guess who's the Cap'n.

Between the 60+ hour weeks and the RTO chumpfuckery, I'm barely keeping it together.

My first job i worked at small company with some old boomer ceo but margins were razor thin and products had to succeed otherwise the company would collapse. Even though he was a massive asshole he actually did and enjoyed doing a lot of the companies work and knew what the product should be, then sold it and managed all the customers. Did sales did marketing shaped everything relatively well. So other than the pay being utter dogshit the job was actually quite fun cos i made actual products that got sold and used.

Now i work in big business the leadership genuinely have no context or understanding of what the job we do is because they slipped in from consultancies where just lying and sounding clever is the name of the game. All they do is sit there and smugly repeat some buzzword or soundbite and look really proud of themselves while giving no direction at all. But they still love to micromanage? So they have no holistic view of anything but will make ridiculous demands of this small insignificant part of the work making it take months longer just to feel useful.

See when I was a designer (structural/mechanical drafter, mostly bulk materials handling systems like conveyors and piping), I kinda loved it when I designed something that never got made. I still got paid, still got to solve all the neat little puzzles that go into a design, BUT I didn't have to suffer any anxiety that I made an error that might cost time, money, or, god forbid, blood! Win-win-win! Now part of that is how atomized we all were anyway, how little connection we had even to the projects that did get built, but even so.