I've recently had a taste of management.  I blogged awhile back about my frustration with having to take on and lead 6 projects at work.  All running in different directions. All at different stages of development.  All with different channels of communication with the clients.

Now I've found my self knee deep in what is called the world of management. I don't think I want it.  Too many people coming to be with questions and demands.  Is it done yet? What's my password? What am I doing wrong? I think people come to be because I'm patient and provide solutions.  Or at least help them find the location where they can get a solution.  Such help is amazingly enough rarely found elsewhere in the organization.

Rediculous SOP

Son of a what? I was about to ask when my boss banned the use of FTP.  Today I was informed of yet another randomly declared SOP.  I had to ask what an SOP was.  Turns out it's an acronym for Standard Operating Procedure.  It is now standard operating procedure to commit each change to a repository, and then SSH to the remote server and conduct an SVN update.  Only to refresh your page, discover something is wrong and repeat.

I've come to fancy the use of FTP as Adobe Dreamweaver provides an upload on save feature. Ctrl-S and refresh your page.  If it isn't obvious I'm speaking of web application development.  Unfortunately, I don't think my boss has written a line of code in a long time.  He may have forgotten what a pain in the ass debugging is.  More to the point, I don't think the developers that work with compiled languages appreciate what I'm complaining about.  But if you could skip the compilation step... wouldn't you?

Either way, it's just another random SOP that my boss has seemed to pull out of his ass.  Much like the time he banned the use of object oriented programming. Or PHP5 all together regardless of destination server.  Apparently it adds unneeded complication to an application.

Word of the Day

My aggravation and frustration required a new word to describe it.  Faggravation.  I was faggravated by the unneeded complication that was added.  If I'm the only developer on a project, why am I committing to a repo after every file save?  Not to mention the repo seems to confuckulate itself after 5000 or so revisions.

Our office invented confuckulated and confuckulation last spring.  Others may claim ownership, but I'm most certain it came out of our office and somehow found it's way into the urban dictionary.  Today, I submitted faggravating to the dictionary.

My Opinion is Valued

My boss has informed me numerous times that he values my opinion.  So when he delivered his new SOP.  I informed him that it was faggravating. 

His response was "if u r gonna complain about my decisions u should at least insult them using the proper spelling of your made up words."  I originally spelled it fagavating.  He believes it should be spelled fagravating.  Considering the spelling of aggravating, I concluded that faggravating is indeed the correct spelling.

Either way, I informed him that I found this really cool IPod floating around the office.  Damn Mac lovers.  Anyways, he was quiet grateful that I'd found the IPod he's been hunting for all week.  We'll see if I remember to take it with me to Pierre when I head home this weekend. I'm fighting the urge to peruse and pilfer it's contents.  If it was anything but an IPod I might try it.

Shoveling off Responsibility

I've made it a point to bitch about the work load my boss has caused me to endure.  Each time I bring it up, he informs me that I need to delegate more and that the load is for only a few more weeks till the J2EE project pans out.  He's been telling me this for several weeks now.

Delegation seems like a good enough idea.  However, stuff just seems to take longer when I delegate.  Something that would take me 20 minutes usually ends up taking someone else 45-60 minutes.  Only after I spend 10 minutes explaining to them how to do it.  Eventually, it ends up being wrong and I have to go back in and spend another 10 minutes fixing it.  Seems like an uphill battle.  I keep hoping though that the people I delegate to will learn how to do the work I do.  In the mean while, these tight budget projects can't afford wasted time.  So I don't log the time spent explaining or fixing. 20 hours weeks on paper are really 25 hour weeks.  I make the excuse to myself that the heightened pay rate makes up for it.

The even bigger problem is that in any given 5 day week I spend 2 days helping/explaining; 2 days emailing or calling clients clients and completing ridiculous SOP forms, estimates, and general paperwork.  That 5th day, I might actually make some progress on one of my many overdue, over budget projects.

Today, I spent my 5th day training a new guy with bad BO.  My boss informed me that it was my responsibility to have a discussion with him regarding hygiene. I don't see any reprieve from the ridiculous bureaucracy that is the business world.