Mar 26

 Begrudgingly I am back to work today. Of course, I could do without it. But. Meh. My notion of doing a good job has bugged me to pick up the stress ball again.

As it turns out in the 3 weeks I have been off, not much has happened. And a few things have fallen apart. Everything in stasis awaiting my return.

It's disappointing that the entire team seems incapable of solving shit unless I am there. I thought we were getting beyond that. Apparently not. And as I've dug a little bit around, the mistakes and missteps accumulate. It is like a never ending avalanche of mediocrity at best, and absolute horseshit at worst.

Perhaps it's me. Grumpy. Too old for this shit. Expectations too high. But I know it's not. The quality of code I am used to has deteriorated in the last 20 years. Slowly getting worse. Slowly forgetting why we do this, or that. Or just general optimisations. It seems a bulk of younger devs just "don't get it". Too tied up in the whizzbangs of the latest navel gazing wheeze.

I can only compare to my old blue chip and corp days and lament that things have got worse. And at the end of the corp days, things weren't great at that. Lack of knowledge.

Ho hum.

Moving on.

There's a saying that goes, when everything is high priority, nothing is.

This is a common problem in IT.

There is such a thing as a priority list. This is an order of things that should be worked on. If you have 10 things, then each one gets a discrete number from 1 to 10, and you work on the list top to bottom. 1 first, then 2 and so on.

What tends to happen however is people get excited - and stupid. And they end up giving you 10 things, and labelling each as priority 1.

Which means there is no priority at all. Thus completely destroying having a priority system.

But this also means when something isn't done, they can turn around and say, well it was highest priority ! Why is it not done ? Because everything else was also the highest priority, meaning nothing was.

This is one of a long list of things that stops being about IT per se, and just comes down to people. People being people and being dumbasses and liking plausible deniability and not having to think about difficult things, like, which priority order to put things in. Just give everything highest priority, sit back and tell yourself you did good.

Uh huh.

I think some of the problem - particularly from uneducated users - tends to be that they conflate importance with priority. Sure. Everything can be important. But here's the kicker. What order do you want those important things done in. Do you want the lawn mowed first, or dinner cooked ? The answer is not YES. You have to pick one. Yes but, what if we didn't pick one, and just tell you to do them all at once as if by magic. Ah ha ! Genius !

It's at points like these that your opinion of your fellow human beings starts to deflate. Not an IT thing. Just an idiot thing. And trust me. This isn't a learning curve issue where people fuck it up once, then get it, and move on. Oh no. People do this over and over.

Trying to explain reality to the screaming monkey house is futile. You just get screeches and thrown excrement.

And so you get "priority lists" that all have the same number. So. No priority then, because everything is. Or, even more insidious, they give you the list and expect you to prioritise it. Ok. Sure. But I am not the business. Or the clients. I have no clue whether you want to market this in a month or 12 months. I have no clue what your lawyers are telling you, or one of your customers wants or what you have decided your business plan to be, or how important you think one departments request is against another. In theory. I could do that. Go learn all about your business. Become your CTO. Or at the very least spend 6 months auditing you. Become an expert in your business. But. That's its own job. I already have a job. Point of fact, I can do almost all of the jobs. I can mop floors. Make the tea. Sort out the accounts. But I only have one pair of hands. And do I really want to spend all my time mopping floors instead of say, being an IT guru ? And the rub is, this is your responsibility, not mine. Stop pushing your responsibilities onto other people because you don't like doing them, or aren't very good at it.

I think that's why often in IT, particularly corporate IT, the whole idea of a signature on the bottom of a bit of paper saying Do This is all important. Because inevitably when the priority list is screwed up or slopey shoulders start pushing away responsibilities or the impossible asked for or outright denials start flying, the piece of paper with a signature is whipped out, placed on the table, and all eyes turn to the signee. Don't blame us. Blame them.

It speaks volumes about the level of dysfunction that goes on that this is deemed standard practice. No doubt it's useful, but the better question would be, why on earth are we here at all, surely, there has to be a better way ?

In any case. It's human nature. As it turns out, the hairless monkey that dominates this planet isn't that great at thinking, and is very much less intelligent than it likes to think it is. We are all only half a step up beyond figuring out see coconut, get coconut, coconut good. Oooh, Oooh, Aaaah, Aaaah. *sniffs armpit*. Woe be unto those that are a half step and a little bit more above coconut level. In a world that is nothing but a shoulder deep sea of shit that everyone stands in, being a little taller and having a step ladder doesn't do you much other than give you a better appreciation of how much shit there is, and also making you an obvious taller target for everyone to throw shit at.

Enough of work.

My foot is still fucked. Can't move. I have taken to fishing out the ash "staff" I have and using it to hobble around on. It works somewhat, and actually allows me to once in a while move around. Useful for peeing. I have asked for some relief from the docs. They will deign me with a reply within 5 days they promise. Not a solution. Just a reply for when they can see me and sort out my request for help. So. Uh huh. Don't hold your breath. It begs the question exactly what kind of service the GP is offering if they can't even tell you when an appointment may or may not be for 5 days. That's beyond non urgent and into long term planning. It seems they are now only fit for dealing with long term, regularly scheduled, already diagnosed, standard kind of problems. Everything else, is someone elses problem. And then you wonder why A & E screeches about being overloaded with everything - because the GPs don't deal with it. A & E waits these days are a minimum of 4 hours. Doesn't really fit the "E" in A & E does it. Can you please schedule your next emergency for a calendar months time. Thank you.

Broken.

Of late, when the NHS pops up in the news, the opinions of the public seems to have shifted. Whenever someone brings up "underfunded", which used to be the galvanizing default cry, these days they get shouted down, the NHS not being underfunded, but something else going horribly wrong with it. Mismanaged. It seems the public at large have caught up to the fact that the NHS isn't exactly terribly cash short. This is something of a surprise for me. Sure the data backs that up - check out the budget stats and comparisons with other countries. Could the NHS do with a bit more money ? Sure. Is it horribly underfunded ? No. Does it compare funding wise fairly typically with everyone else ? Yes. But so rarely does actual data filter down into the zeitgeist of any issue. This time it seems with the NHS funding it has actually made it into the public conscious ( albeit I really don't know how, there have been no articles I have seen on it ) and that people are fed up with the NHS and not about to pour more money into it.

Interesting times.

Perhaps this is why the UKs almost certain to be next Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, has already said on record that the NHS cannot be a money pit, and that the NHS runs the risk of "L'État, c'est moi" - the state it is me, the notorious apocryphal quote of Louis XIV, which conjures the stink of entitlement and superiority and Give Me All Your Money Because I Am The Important One Here.

For all that, there are some signs of the NHS being a top tier health service. It's just. Very patchy. Somethings are shitty as all hell. Somethings are above and beyond. Spin the wheel, see what you get.

Almost like it's a management problem. N'est ce pas ?