karniv0re's Journal: I Hope the World Burns

There's a scene from Nickelodeon's Salute Your Shorts I remember where Donkeylips and Spud were assigned to trash pickup duty and Donkeylips wasn't going to make weight to go to a wrestling tournament or something, and it all boiled down to him probably not getting to go eat some delicious lobster. I don't know why I remember this so vividly, but I guess it has always stuck in the back of my mind. In that scene, the trash bag rips open and all the trash they had collected starts blowing all over and Donkeylips says, "Garbage! My life is garbage!"

I feel like that lately.

This entire year has been nothing but rejections and watching my career sink. It started with not getting the architect job. I have since considered this blessing in disguise (not the paycheck part), as the action of that rejection caused an equal but opposite reaction in the opposite direction of Data Science. Now, while it is cool that I was spurred in that direction, there's literally nothing here helping me get there.

Earlier this year I felt like I needed a breadwinner of an idea. Something to cement my bonus. That idea was the automation of one of our accessorial billing line items, which I estimated could have brought in around $600k per year. I caught the ear of the guy who could have set that project in motion and then... nothing. I don't know what happened. If there was fear or trepidation in pulling a (slightly) bold move. But for whatever reason, the project never got initiated.

With that out the window, I was given the task of integrating systems with our partners over at R (names changed to protect the guilty). Since they suck at thier jobs and life, I knew this probably wasn't going to actually happen anytime soon, but I needed something to make the project pop. So I thought I would build out our entire portal as a B2B Hypermedia REST API. That is pretty much done and it is just sitting there waiting to move forward, and what's worse, I don't think anyone even cares. No one. I haven't advertised it yet, because nobody even seems to care that I'm literally doing nothing.

Today, I got my mind really hooked on this problem of predictive analysis. Since I'm in a Probability Models class, I successfully modeled one of our processes as a Poisson Process. I know that Asshat is already working ("working") on this with our Data Science team, but they're going to take supposedly months to get some proprietary 3rd party system up to do forecasting, and I know that I can have a crude but fairly effective model up in a week or less. So I took it to the big boss. But my pitch must have been off, because he just kinda said, "Cool!" and dismissed it like it was a neat little chart. FUCK. What do I have to do around here to get some important, thoughtful work?! Who's dick do I have to suck?!

So here we are, on the brink of the 4th quarter and I have nothing to show for this year. Unbelievable.

I literally don't even need to come in. I could have stayed home for 90% of this year. That's how far I've advanced my career in 2015.

My influence here is fading too. Our new architect doesn't clue me in on anything he's doing (but has made good friends with the other developers), my boss was let go, so now power-hungry Asshat has all the cool projects, my new boss doesn't really have a nose for strategic development, since his specialty is in improving and maintaining legacy systems, nor does he know how to do battle with Asshat. And as a symptom of all this, I'm starting to care less. Fuck it. If nobody is going to give me work or let me run with projects I think would be cool, I'll just do nothing. I'll do homework. I'll leave at 2:30. I'll learn things I want to learn, like R and Python.

I'm so frustrated. And I can't leave, because of my debt situation. Fuck this. I'm going for a run. Then I'll come back, but all I'm going to do is read my 100 pages of Markov Chains of class.
AAHHHGGHhhhghghghh!!!!!