But isn't management ultimately responsible for every flaw? I mean, ultimately? If I was that negligent, and they were that knowledgeable and I was that replaceable, wouldn't they have just shitcanned me? Either you don't work in a professional environment, or I work in a _really_ dysfunctional one.
I'm the admin for 50-something servers in a testing lab we run for all of North and South America. Several of our Europe guys also use the stuff I've set up, because they don't have the needed capabilities there. I'm also actively continuing development of a C# based website that screenscrapes information from several internal websites to aggregate information into one nice happy site for senior management to review. In addition, this site takes email based alerts from an exchange account and gets them into a database where I can display it as well. I'm also working on a separate one to provide logging for ITIL ICC calls. I also help with supporting our proprietary software, including staging issues and coping with the things that our local helpdesk decide is too hard for them, because they can barely string together basic linux commands. As in, they've trouble struggling with the concept of piping. I'm literally the only developer on the site. My metrics are nebulous, including helping with migrations and endangered accounts (from a technical point of view, of course). None of them include "documentation". Hell, my boss mocked me one day because he found out that I spent hours on backend work, and "he couldn't see the difference" because I didn't yet have it display on page. Oh, and I'm also one of two people who provide training to said helpdesk, because they downsized the two people in our training department capable of handling it in the region, and did I mention that we've suspended paying for travel for anyone below the executive level? I spent an hour today explaining to the most intelligent guy on the helpdesk how perl arrays work, and how to store and manipulate data from two separate text files in one. Finally, I provide support for anyone running anything on hardware that wasn't procured through the corporate office, which is far more numerous than it should be. We have an entire separate network for servers that have a WAN link into one of our client networks for remote management. This are in violation of our corporate network team's policies. The only reason why they haven't been shut down is because the manager of the team who uses the computers on that network ignores the emails he gets every two months demanding he supply information about what switches provide access to that vlan so that they can shut it down. The only reason why they haven't been is because of the fact that bureaucracy in a global company this vertical takes literally years to catch up to the problems at hand. Again, I reiterate that I have no backup; if there are problems when I'm on vacation, they sit until I get back, or my phone rings all day until I'm somewhere I can pick it up if no one can think up a workaround.
If I got hit by a bus tomorrow, the website would get disbanded. The workaround would be that someone would get appointed to manually copy/paste the information together in an email, every eight hours. The current way of handling said ICC calls would continue, which is to manually enter data into an excel file hosted on a Sharepoint site. All the code I have thus far would sit diligently in the (documented) repository I've set up. Training would continue, though not at the level I can provide. Support for our software would exist still of course, The access to the network that I mentioned would fall by the wayside, because there's no way to access it from a VPN, which means that our BCP will fail should we need to invoke it. That's something that was just brought to my attention and I'm working on fixing it, but I haven't gotten there yet and I get hit tomorrow, remember?
Thinking about it now, I could probably do a better job if I worked more than 40 hours a week. That being said, I work for a company that offers no incentives for going above and beyond. I get micromanaged if I'm seen staring at a diagram or whiteboard longer than my boss would expect someone to because I look like I'm "zoning out". We're laying thousands of people off this year, with promise of more to come next year. I have literally no incentive to do anything more than the minimum required of me. I think my boss has actually blocked two attempts at transfer to different internal positions. Frankly, getting laid off would be a blessing. So would getting hit by a bus. Tomorrow, I'm going to spend at least three hours arguing with telecoms about network issues, one to two explaining SQL to a Chinese lady twice my age (who hasn't developed any new knowledge since her grasp on Solaris 8) who will argue and disbelieve every attempt I make at using it to relate to the issue she's trying to troubleshoot.
I understand where my previous post would come off as arrogant. Does anything I do matter to the company? No, I'll be the first to say, fuck no. The "company" barely realizes I exist, and I'm probably usually better of for it. If I died, the company would exist tomorrow. Odds are it would exist as long as it would one way or the other. Does it matter to the employees? It must, otherwise they wouldn't ask me to do such things, and they wouldn't make use of the things I've done. Ultimately, does what I do matter, period? It must. I've saved accounts, resolved issues, and in a few cases been the only thing that has kept capabilities of our support staff functioning. I can't say that I think it's "funny" though.
What do you do?
