One day deeper into the week, one more day of fruitless work on a project I can’t talk about behind me. I’m not as upset about everything as I was yesterday, though I’m still a little upset and frustrated, but now I’m feeling extra worn down because we’re still unable to figure out why things aren’t working the way we want them to and how nothing we do that improves those results makes any kind of sense. It has everyone stumped and while we have been able to make slowly improving progress over the past two months, we haven’t really fixed things yet. It is exhausting to work on, mentally and emotionally, because we’re just beating out heads against a problem, and it is exhausting physically because any proposals about different methodology or improvements require a decent amount of heavy labor from me. This work has become every kind of exhausting and I can feel myself less and less able to spring back from it with every passing day. Sure, nothing I’m doing is wrong or a failure or anything like that, but it sure feels like a failure when I’ve been working on a problem this long and this consistently but haven’t been able to figure anything out. Sure, my job is to collect data and tell people that things are wrong, but I clearly understand the problems and how they play out better than everyone else (as my repeated explanations prove almost daily) so it feels like some part of the solution is my responsibility. Regardless of whether that is right or wrong, it is how I feel and these repeated days of zero progress despite my efforts have me feeling incredibly drained.

I’ve often thought I’m a poor tester. Not because I don’t know how to do my job or even that I struggle to do it well. I just don’t feel an emotional reward from finding problems like my fellow testers do. I get an emotional reward from understanding or solving problems, though, which means I tend to get sucked into exploring a problem or software bug too deeply because I’m trying to figure it out rather than just reporting it and moving on with my life. I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few years trying to get my emotional and personal fulfillment outside of work so I’m not so personally tied up in my job in a way that was clearly and indisputably bad. Sure, I’ve managed to switch things up so I’m not looking for my job to be the main source of those things, but it is difficult to ignore the opportunity for them when it presents itself with exactly the kind of problem I like (problems with no clear solution, that require collecting data, and that allow me to put my head down and just work on them for hours). These “opportunities” rarely pan out and I’m starting to suspect that none of them are actually opportunities but illusions instead. Statistically speaking, after all, one of them should have worked out well for me by now, if there was a chance that any of them might.

This is why I write and run tabletop games for my emotional and personal fulfillment. I get more out of making things than finding their flaws. Sure, as I mentioned yesterday, I’m part of the complex machine of making things that is any Research and Development team, but I’m so far removed from the process that it is difficult to feel like I made anything, especially when literally no one else but myself seems to think that. Most people are careful not to suggest that I’m a detriment to getting things made, but it’s difficult to ignore the gaps in what they say when they say anything at all about my work as a tester. I’m pretty sure no one else (other than my boss who I’ve brought around and fellow testers who are in my same position) really believes that I’m helping make something when I’m doing my job by reporting problems, helping figure out solutions, and then suggesting ways to avoid future pitfalls, but it’s difficult to really know since most of the team is quiet or incredibly unwilling to speak up about other peoples’ performance at work. The only non-manager and non-tester exception to that is one of the engineers I work with who, despite most of our conversations being me asking him to make changes or telling him that things are broken/didn’t fix the problem, always thanks me for doing my job. I can’t read him at all, so I have no idea if he feels we’re working collaboratively or if he’s just being polite like that (which isn’t uncommon in people born and raised in the Midwest). Once we’re through all this and I actually have emotional energy for things again, I’ll probably ask him about it. For now, though, I just take it like a compliment.

I don’t think I’ve ever worked on a project that has struggled with one or two specific problems for as long as this one has. It makes it difficult to get out of this emotional rut when every day at work is just the same thing over and over again, with some small variations, just to discover that the results we’re getting are worse or better than before but not so much so that it’s worth mentioning. I’ve done a lot of work on myself to not be emotionally invested in this project, to just take each day as they come, but it is a real struggle to face this much failure for this long without letting it get to you. I can see my coworkers, the engineers assigned to this piece of the project, already going a little wild around the eyes every time we start talking about this, and most of them haven’t even been working on this part of the project for as long as I have (we had to shuffled some engineers around our projects, so the one I was working with initially is doing other stuff now and the others had a broader scope than just this problem, so they’re fairly recent to the whole “focus on this one thing and only this one thing” party I’m leading). It makes it difficult to feel good about my work when my coworkers are constantly calling my results and assertions into doubt because they just need me to prove the baseline results all over again, for their sanity. I’ve done the same tests a dozen times to prove the same thing I already knew just to calm my coworkers down because they’ve begun to feel like they can’t trust any of the results we’re getting when so many different variables (alone or together) can alter but never correct the errors we’re seeing.

Someday, I won’t be doing this work any more. Specifically this problem and project I’m working on and testing in general. I don’t know how long it’ll be before I can get myself into a job that better aligns better with how I work and think, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be done with this project in about nine months to a year. It can’t go on forever, after all. Either it’ll never come together and we won’t finish it because it proves beyond our abilities or we’ll figure out enough of the problems to release it and then spend a bunch of time supporting it until it’s stable enough that everyone can just not talk about it for a month or two while we all recover. I look forward to those potential futures. I look forward to not being this intensely wrapped up in a project. I look forward to being quiet and ignored once again, rather than needing to deal with people who don’t see my work in a positive light while simultaneously needing me to help them deal with the emotional impact this project and its problems are having on them. If only people were better at seeing the soft skills stuff that I excel at or recognized the fact that no one has worked harder to get this problem solved than me (or even that the only progress we’ve made has been at my prompting because this is an interdisciplinary problem and no engineer is willing to take responsibility for making sure it is fixed). I feel that isn’t asking too much.