All of last week’s chickens have come home to roost. The letter I sent got responses, the work I was doing has come around back to me, and all of my crafting in Final Fantasy 14 has culminated in my plans for tonight. I’ll write more about how all that goes later this week, I’m sure, but suffice it to say that I’ve been very productive and, after lots of effort, I’m finally ready to actually make the gear itself. I’m also going to hold off on writing more about my letter responses and my subsequent therapy session for a bit longer, until I’ve had the time to process it all a little while longer. Instead, today I’m going to talk about the absolute nightmare that is this one bug I found at work. Thankfully, I found it and, since it’s my job to do that, things are going well for me in terms of my career. This will not pose any problems for me in that direction and will more likely be a feather in my cap than a hindrance since I found a horrible problem in an unorthodox way that would surely have eventually happened in the field but might otherwise have never occured in a testing environment. It’s just going to be a lot of work for me and I can’t even take satisfaction in foreseeing a thorny issue since I just sort of bumbled into this. I mean, I absolutely made the decisions that resulted in me learning that it’s possible to burn out an essential component of this product in a way that is safe but only because it renders the entire thing unuseable, but I didn’t think it was going to go poorly. I was actually looking for something unrelated that I still haven’t pinned down, but such is the life of a tester. You do a lot of inexplicable or unlikely things and stumble into bugs you never could have anticipated.
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Talking To An Empty Room: Virtual Meetings with No Cameras
I had to do a presentation at work today. I had time to prepare for it, but I felt a decent amount of resentment that I’d been forced into needing to present at all. The testers at my employer meet once a month (virtually) to watch (or at least listen to) a presentation by representatives from one of the testing teams. The goal is for each team to take turns presenting some aspect of their work in order to foster inter-team communication and provide each other with information that could prove useful in our testing work. While this makes sense for some of the teams, it is pointless for others. It is especially pointless for my team. While a few teams in the Research and Development department work together or work on related products, our company’s diversification means that a lot of us work on entirely unrelated things. Literally no part of my testing work will ever be useful to anyone who isn’t on my team and we already share everything internally, so there’s no point to me going to the meeting. The whole meeting only exists because of a bit of political maneuvering as two people higher up the corporate food chain fought over control of the testers for reasons I can’t fathom. It’s not like either one of them has any actual authority over the rest of us. Neither of them was, is, or ever will be in my management structure. But I still have to go to these meetings and take multiple hours out of my day to prepare a presentation for them, for some reason.
Continue reading(In)Adequate Staffing In The Workplace
I think a lot about the way that workplaces are staffed. My previous job specifically hired people who hadn’t worked anywhere else and then basically ground then into dust for way too little pay, relying on quantity to make up for a lack of quality (specifically to rely on the quanitity of employees to make up for the lack of quality training they gave to those entry-level employees). Some people thrived in that environment and some people, myself included, did not because they didn’t fit in perfectly. My current job tends to work very hard to avoid getting rid of employees but seems to be struggling with figuring out how to retain employees, especially young-ish ones. At thirty one, I’m one of the youngest people on my team and, until this week, at almost six years, had worked at the company for the shortest amount of time. Throw in a bunch of horror stories about working at Amazon facilities, coffee shops, university systems (to name a few high-profile employers who have achieved a level of notoriety thanks to the recent surge of labor violations on their parts and the resulting union drives) and I’ve got a lot of different data about what it’s like to work for an employer that has staffing issues.
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