Work/Life Balance

I can only assume it has something to do with me, and not the job. It doesn’t seem to matter where I work, because I always find a way to make the work the ruler of my life. It’s good to have a strong work ethic, but it’s nutty to sacrifice everything else in life to the work. That said, the latest drama in my work life has nothing to do with me and everything to do with poor management and decision making at the higher levels.

I work for a large company that has a strong brand and a huge web presence. My job is to take care of that web presence and to make sure that it runs no matter what (AKA: Production Engineer). As part of that, my team is responsible for managing code deployment to the back-end servers during the many updates that are performed. This requires a lot (too much, in fact) off-hours work. It’s gotten even more difficult to work normal hours now that our European division has become so prominent and we have to take their business hours into consideration, along with our own. This wouldn’t be a problem, except for the fact that the constant expansion of the company’s properties hasn’t included accompanying expansion in employees. In this case, if the EU portion of the business is so important and we have so much development and QA staff over in Europe, wouldn’t it make sense to have Operations people (Sys Admins, Production Engineers, 1st and 2nd tier support, etc.) staffed as well, in order to support their environment? Yes…but it wasn’t done. Therefore, the same people who support North America also have to support Europe, despite the fact that we occasionally like to sleep and get away from the office.

The big (and I mean big) drama this week was the fact that we have a massive release scheduled for this Saturday, November 4th. This release has been on the roadmap for a long, long time. It includes every cluster of servers and all divisions (including EU). The sheer amount of code that’s being pushed is daunting. Think about it from my perspective: all of the teams that make up the various portions of our business have dedicated development and QA teams; they all work hard to develop code and fixes for their products; all these products have to work on the site in conjunction with all the other products, without taking one another out; and when their code needs to be released, there are exactly four guys who are responsible for making sure it gets where it needs to go. I’m one of those four. Four guys…to support all those teams with all their people and all their code. Four guys who are on the hook to make sure that the site runs smoothly. Yeah…that’s good planning.

So this release is a huge deal for us. It’s on par with the last release that started at 10:00pm on a Friday night and reached its first break at 4:30pm the next day (then we had to pick it up again on Sunday and the rest of the week to “hotfix”). We’re working our asses off prepping all our staging, documentation and scripts for this release. I had to refuse a request to go to my cousin’s last-minute wedding (her fiance is being deployed to Iraq, so they want to get married before he goes, hence the last minute nature) because I’d already given my word to my boss that I would work the release months ago (yes, on the roadmap for months). Other guys on other teams had to reschedule family plans, parties, etc. In other words: a lot of people made very specific plans and/or changes to plans based upon this release.

So what happens today? The release gets pushed back a week. Yep…2 1/2 days before it’s scheduled to go, the release gets pushed. I’m pissed. I even remember telling my boss a month ago when that if management waited until the last minute to push this release and caused me to miss my cousin’s wedding for nothing, I was going to start punching VP’s in them mouth (we have a lot of VP’s…I could walk blindfolded down the hallways swinging my fists and hit at least 12). Pissed, I tell you. And one my teammates is pissed because he had plans for next weekend (the new release date) to go away with his wife and now that’s fucked. No one’s happy. Not me, not my team, not my boss, not development, not QA…no one. And it’s all because EU can’t get their shit together…effectively none of the shit that they’re supposed to release is ready to go. And all parts of the release are dependent upon the other parts; hence if one can’t go, none can go.

So my team and I spend the rest of the afternoon pissed off and unable to focus. Then, right before 5:00pm, we get notice the release is back on for this weekend. It appears that someone forgot to tell the new President of Business and Technology that the release was going to slip. He made the crew send another email saying that the release is back on for this weekend.

I get home…I log in remotely to get back to my prep. work for the release and I check my email. Now the word is the decision whether we slip or not will be made tomorrow morning because there are other parts of the release not working (now it’s Sales’ Customer Response Management tool that’s all fucked up with the new code in QA, not just EU that’s all fucked). So the release may still be pushed (my boss believes it will be pushed) and I will have missed any chance to getting out to California for my cousin’s wedding. I’m fucking bullshit either way.

The lesson I learned: family always comes before work. From now on, family will always be first and work, which has shown absolutely no respect for me or my time, will take a back seat. I do good work for them (I’ve won two awards in the year I’ve been there) and will continue to do good work for them, but I will no longer have such fucked up priorities. If they can’t handle it, then I’ll get another job.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 01st, 2006 at 10:29pm and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.