Subj : Re: Kill 'em all; let god sort 'em out
To   : Atreyu
From : jack phlash
Date : Wed Oct 20 2021 08:59:49

on 19 Oct 2021, Atreyu said...
 
 At> Ahh I can relate... my IT manager was such an asshole. He was right most
 At> of the time on a lot of things but when he was wrong, or called out on
 At> his attitude, he was just so flippant and "better than everyone".
 At> 
 At> When he finally up and left and I inherited the role, there was a huge
 At> mess left behind. Seems to be the ones who brag about their tech-skill
 At> tend to have their own backyards in such disarray.

Ahh, yeah... :/ Some of the best people I've worked with have excelled at
certain parts of their jobs and totally sucked at others. One of the first
engineers I ever worked with who I respected immensely on a technical level 
appears to have spent 90% of his time studying for various certs (getting the
company to pay for material and classes) while teaching courses on that same
material at night for a side gig, instead of actually doing is job, for
instance.

One thing I've learned through my career is that there is never any sort of
perfect transition when anyone with a lot of "tribal knowledge" leaves. On
smaller teams, engineers tend to have a lot more agency, so a lot of the way
things are implemented comes down purely to preference or concessions for 
numerous reasons, and so many of these decisions aren't documented. Even
bigger teams have the same issues if responsibilities aren't strictly tracked
and managed.

At my last job I was essentially the only engineer, but from a technical
standpoint it wasn't very challenging - I had that place running incredibly
smoothly when I left. I was lucky enough to established relationship with the
dude who was taking my position over, so I was able to documented everything I
knew he'd need, have in-depth conversations about some problem areas, etc.
Months later dude is emailing me asking me dumb questions about things he's
having issues with, having clearly not read the documentation. In one
situation I had clearly documented an issue we had with a particular NAS
appliance, but instead of performing a quick 5 minute fix on it, he ended up
replacing the entire thing (despite not really having the money to do so.)
Later, he gutted some other perfectly fine equipment because he seemingly
couldn't figure it out. On one hand, not my problem anymore, but on the
other, it was pretty disheartening to have everything you setup get torn down
because someone couldn't either RTFM or hack it, while your name is probably
getting dragged through the mud in the process. On the flip side, dude
probably thought I left him a huge mess behind too. Sometimes it's a matter
of perspective.

 At> Auditing our software licensing was a freaking nightmare...

Ugh. I felt a phantom gut punch reading this. BTDT... :(

|08j |15A C K |08p |15H L A S H |08!

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