Journal tompaulco's Journal: I got to do something interesting... 1
It is not very often that I actually get to do something interesting at work. Once upon a time I used to do interesting and challenging work all the time. That was back when I worked on database administration and data warehousing. I used to have to come up with software solutions for business challenges. But for the last five years I have spent all my time coming up with solutions for software challenges. All of the software that I have had to use in previous years has been poorly designed, buggy, and basically not ready for release to the real world. So I spend all of my time coding around bugs that the vendor's won't fix, creating functionality via APIs that ought to be in the base product, and of course, spending huge amounts of time in meetings fighting with the vendors about their crappy products. I spend less than 5% of my time actually using the software to meet our business challenges.
I did finally do something interesting yesterday, although it was still an end run around a roadblock put up by our vendor. Basically we have been fighting with them for about 6 years on the fact that they don't provide us sufficient information on who is keying the batches in their product. Their "keying information" consists of the start and stop time and the keyer name of the last session spent on a batch of work. If one keyer does not finish the batch and another keyer picks it up, the start time gets overwritten and the keyer name gets overwritten, instead of another audit record being written. For six years, the vendor refused to fix this. So yesterday, I sat down and started writing code to write database entries every time the keyers changed any of the data. It was only a few hours work to create a solution that will give us all the information we need, and I still need to put together some queries to wrap this up into a report, but this is by far the most interesting thing I have done at work recently (pretty sad, I guess).
This just reinforces my recent thinking that my real calling in professional life is databases and datawarehousing. It is the only type of work I have ever done that gave me a sense of fulfillment. It was also something that I was very, very good at, as any number of former supervisors will attest. I wish I could find a job doing that sort of work again.
I did finally do something interesting yesterday, although it was still an end run around a roadblock put up by our vendor. Basically we have been fighting with them for about 6 years on the fact that they don't provide us sufficient information on who is keying the batches in their product. Their "keying information" consists of the start and stop time and the keyer name of the last session spent on a batch of work. If one keyer does not finish the batch and another keyer picks it up, the start time gets overwritten and the keyer name gets overwritten, instead of another audit record being written. For six years, the vendor refused to fix this. So yesterday, I sat down and started writing code to write database entries every time the keyers changed any of the data. It was only a few hours work to create a solution that will give us all the information we need, and I still need to put together some queries to wrap this up into a report, but this is by far the most interesting thing I have done at work recently (pretty sad, I guess).
This just reinforces my recent thinking that my real calling in professional life is databases and datawarehousing. It is the only type of work I have ever done that gave me a sense of fulfillment. It was also something that I was very, very good at, as any number of former supervisors will attest. I wish I could find a job doing that sort of work again.
Interesting work hard to find (Score:2)
I can totally relate to this. It can be very hard to find interesting work. I've worked for a company where in the end I realized that all I was doing, was creating screens for people to enter information in a database. Really basic SQL at that as well. The seniors got to play with the interesting queries and optimizations. I left for greener hills, but in the end I found that key to a pleasurable work-week is that I learn something new, and do something which requires creative thinking.