"My biggest problem with this blog is that "the future" is so amorphous and hard to hold on to. Saying things like "In the future, we'll have robots to take care of our robots" is great and all, but it isn't something that I'm going to put a lot of passion into discussing.But, if you were to go and look at that post now, you won't find my comment, because EDS's timid attempt at blogging relies on comment moderation. I can't say that I 100% disagree with them -- there is a lot of worry in business about legal liability, and comment SPAM is actually a pretty big problem.I think the focus needs to be a little bit nearer term. Not necessarily immediate, but I would say like 1 to 2 years out, tops.
In general, I would like to see EDS get a lot more aggressive with blogging. Take some more risks. A lot of our vendors (Sun, Microsoft, BMC) and customers (GM) are doing a lot more with blogging than we are. I think that's a shame, and we should be working our tails off to catch up, and then get out ahead.
-Andy."
But in this case, I don't agree with censoring my comment. But this is what makes blogging so great -- I can just take this comment, and post it on my own blog. I could have just posted this to my internal blog at work, but since I intended this comment to be displayed on the Internet, I have decided to post it to my public blog.
Ultimately, the EDS Next Big Thing blog loses out -- because it has lost a vital piece of converstation, which I will now be steering over towards my blog. My whole "life thesis" is that being open ultimately wins out over being closed, and that really seems to apply to blog comments.
UPDATE: My comment appears now, after about a 2 day wait.
-Andy.
So, I couldn't have predicted this when I woke up this morning, but today was a pretty gosh-darn good day at work. For the last several months, I have been evangelizing blogging, and how I think it could really help EDS. I actually started thinking these thoughts after attending Bloggercon last year. My first attempt at blogging was to pitch the idea of allowing me to start up an external blog on eds.com to some random people within the company.
Obviously, that didn't go anywhere.
So, I refactored my idea, and pitched the idea of blogging internally, to my immediate team. Well, my boss bit on the idea, and gave me the freedom to explore this (after we shipped our code two weeks ago, of course). So, I grabbed some OSS blogging software, and got something setup at work. I've been blogging for about two weeks now, and it has been going pretty good. At least, it's making me feel better about work, and it is something that I really look forward to. So far, I have been posting about once a day, except for this week, where I have been posting twice a day.
In fact, I was getting ready to write my first post this morning, when one of my co-workers alerted me to the fact that EDS announced a corporate blog today [registration required: use bugmenot]! The url is http://www.eds.com/blogs - go and check it out!
So, it looks like I won't be "the one" who brings blogging to EDS. But that's okay, I'm just happy that there are some other folks there who are on the same page that I am. What's good is that I am now getting plugged in with some people in EDS who "get" blogs. My whole master plan for this blog that I'm doing at EDS isn't just for me to have a place to write, but to get lots and lots of people in EDS sharing information through blogs. Stage one has been to setup a platform (done), and now I'm in stage two, trying to recruit blogging soldiers for my war on how my company communicates internally. I felt like I made a lot of progress on this front today -- so yeah, it was a quite unexpected, but all together good day.
-Andy.
I found out today that another person on my team is resigning.
There are a number of dimensions to being "satisfied at work". Basically, I see it as being either "the technology, "the mission", or "the team". If I were super-interested in what I was doing technically, then I could have a really great time of work, irrespective of whether-or-not the work mattered, or if I found working with my co-workers gratifying.
The reason why I have stayed at EDS this long has been mostly for "the team". The technology and mission components certainly exist, but I really like my co-workers: we're a tight-knit bunch, we stimulate each other intellectually, and balance each other out pretty well with our strengths and weaknesses. On the upside, this has made the work environment pretty great. On the downside, when people decide to leave, it because a bigger kick-in-the-pants than usual.
So, at this point, I'm pretty-much wondering when I'm going to have to pull the eject lever for myself. It's certainly shaping up to be an interesting summer, indeed.
-Andy.
Thinking about it, the best way for me to summarize how I'm feeling about EDS right now is that I have bipolar personality disorder about it. At one point last week, I was entirely jazzed about working there -- I have some ideas about bringing blogging and Wiki to the table, that I think could really revolutionize how the company communicates internally. I have been doing some work, giving presentations, trying to sell my ideas, and I'm at the point where I need to start some pilot projects in order to get some proof in the pudding. All of that is totally great.
But then I have days like today, which just make me feel like "fuck it, I want to quit". One of the members of our (small) team announced that he is moving on, and will be joining a different company in a few weeks. It really hurts because this person is someone that I have a deep respect for on the technical computer side of things (which isn't to say that he isn't a stand-up guy in other ways -- he is, but I'm all about the CompSci kung fu). We're certainly not going to be able to replace him -- even if we could hire externally (but we cannot, so the point is moot).
It has been fun, essentially being a startup within a big-giant-honking organization, but I'm not sure how much longer it is going to last. What has made everything worth it so far has been the team -- I have a lot of respect and admiration for my co-workers. Not only are they technically brilliant, but they're also a fun group of cats to hang out with. So, it really sucks to see the team slowly breaking apart. But, as the saying goes, "all good things must come to an end".
-Andy.
(Bonus Blog Entry: Really-loud music that I listened too after getting home today: track 13 off of Ænima, "Ænema". That, at least, made me feel a little better.)
Today was day one of a three day training course in ITIL, for me and my immediate co-workers.
Boring, boring, boring, boring-as-hell, boring!
Why so boring? Is it the quality of the training materials being used? No, they are okay (if uninspired). The instructor? While he probably won't win "instructor of the year", he is adequate, and hence not the problem. The real problem that I have is that I simply don't give a flying fig about change, incident, problem, and release management. And all of the associated processes, documentation, and rigid social structures that make all of it work.
And this isn't a shock -- I knew that I wasn't interested in this crap before taking this course. But I'm stuck with it, and I just have to slog through it.
What is interesting, however, is that after sitting in front of this material for eight full hours today, my mind was actually numb. When I got home from work, I had to blast "The Patient" on my stereo, and submit my body to a punish workout just to feel alive again.
Two more days of this is really going to hurt. Or turn me into a process-loving zombie. You know, whichever comes first.
-Andy.
When I said in a previous post that I was "training my replacements" at work, I didn't mean that I was being let go by EDS. Instead, the support function of my job is going to a new team, and I am going to be moved into a full-time development role. So far, the training is going pretty well. I have been working like a Japanese beaver every night, cranking out PowerPoint slides and other training materials. Yesterday, I talked for over 8 hours. I'm surprised that the new team can still stand to be in the same room with me...
-Andy.
I'm a little bit stressed going into this week -- two other engineers and I are training our replacements, and I'm on tap for a lot of said training. I really want to do a good job, but of course, I'm so busy *doing* my job, that I have had a hard time finding time to prepare. And in general, I don't like being unprepared for things.
When I last left my own personal outsourcing saga, my team and I were interviewing people over in India to take over the support portion of my job. Well, we hard a hard time finding people who we felt were qualified enough for the job, for one. And for two, the new division boss wasn't too hot on the idea of going to India for this job, so that whole idea got scrubbed. The people that are taking over the support role are current EDS employees, who are looking for new gigs. So, no going to India for me.
-Andy.
In my building, I work on the 3rd floor, and the corporate HQ of Opsware is located on the 2nd floor. In my web searchings yesterday, I came across an interesting article about Marc Andreesen, the chairman of Opsware, and his opinion on outsourcing. Summary, he's for it.
Me, I still need some convincing.
-Andy.
Shortly before Easter, I found out from my bosses that half of my job is being outsourced to India.
I'm serious. I can't make this stuff up, people.
So, let me elaborate. As a Field Engineer with EDS Automated Operations, I have a dual role. Two weeks out of every six, I am "on call", which means that I carry the pager, and am available 24/7 to solve any problem that occurs with any of the systems that my team supports. The rest of my time is supposed to be spent doing development -- adding new features to our existing tools, creating new tools, implementing someone else's tool -- you get the idea.
Recently, however, the volume of support requests has been increasing, and we are also getting tasked with more projects. In short, we've got way more work than we can handle. And the solution that management has chosen is to hire some additional help, in India.
So, this was all announced, and then I didn't really hear anything about it for awhile. Then today I found that interviews are on-going, and that I'm going to be asked to do some phone interviews sometime this week (at a very inconvenient time -- like 7:00 PM on Sunday night).
My feelings on outsourcing our mixed. After reading the big Wired article, I came away with the sense that outsourcing is pretty much inevitable, good for developing countries, but I'm not so sure what it's going to do to America. The article points out that this isn't the first time we've had widespread outsourcing of jobs to other countries -- the manufacturing jobs have already bolted over the course of the last several decades. But that was okay, because the white collar jobs showed up.
So, what new class of jobs are going to show up onto the scene in order to keep folks like me employed? Wired argues that America will still be a source of innovation. I don't know that I agree (hence the mixed feelings) -- these is no reason why the next "big thing" can't come from India. The human spirit and the drive to innovate is just as alive over there as it is over here. Another idea is that new industries, like Biotech and Nanotech, may be a source of jobs here. A recent Slashdot post, though, seems to cast some doubt on that.
So anyway, I'm still sorting out my feelings on outsourcing. I tend to think that "everything is going to be okay" -- I'm just not sure how.
As for the less theoretical form of outsourcing, i.e., what's going on with my current job, my feelings are mixed there as well. One one hand, it's going to be great to have the extra help, and to get rid of the pager duty. On the other, it is going to be difficult to overcome the communications barriers imposed by distance. I think that it's going to be a lot of work so that we can have outsourced helpers. But, it will be interesting, too.
And maybe I'll get a free trip out to India, in order to do some training.
-Andy.
And nobody said it was going to be nearly 4:00 AM on a Saturday morning, and that I was going to be finding bugs in code that I'm supposed to be running as part of a server maintenance, scheduled to start about 19 hours from now...
-Andy.
Back when I was a lad, and doing the whole "school" thing, I found that there were good points and bad points about being a student. One of the bad (and I mean, really bad) points about being a student, at least for me, were all of times when it seemed like I was just crushed with work, and things like 12 hour work-days, all-nighters, cram sessions, etc. were necessary in order to generally achieve the "not flunk out" mandate.
It was always a hopeful notion to have, while trying to track down that last bug for your MP while simultaneously studying for that exam, that someday, some shining, glorious day, there would be no more insane, conflicting, overlapping due dates brought on by a multitude of overlapping classes. Someday, school would be over, and then there would just be work.
One job. Where you report to one boss. And only have one thing to do. Boy, that is gonna be great...
But of course, gentle reader, you know better. After working 10+ hours today, and realizing that I'm probably going to have to work all day on Saturday (to meet deadlines from overlapping and conflicting projects), that I suppose the only hope that I have now is retirement.
Retirement will be sane and okay.... Right?!?!?
-Andy.
