💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2023 › 1-12.gmi captured on 2024-03-21 at 16:53:24. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
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Always ominous words. Although, it's above board, everything properly tracked and paid, and that's nice. At my first job, overtime was _implicit_. Whatever needed to be done to ensure the project succeeded, that was the expectation. Were you paid overtime? No. But at least was your salary good? Also no.
Okay, but, did you get the promotion you always wanted? (You guessed it...)
I started off as a developer making $50k CDN - junior developers where I live now start closer to $70k, and good for them. But at the time, there were always projects due, things always seemed to be on fire, and it felt like developers like me, who by tracked metrics (such as ticket failure rate) wrote solid, performant code were valued less than those who could swoop into a bad section of code and bolt a fix into the legacy codebase.
Every time I think of OT I think first about the weekends I'd drive downtown to the office, pay for parking (not reimbursed), maybe someone would order a pizza - these were the years between the heady dot com boom and the tech bro days of the 2010s. Jobs were actually kind of scarce, and expenses were definitely spared.
So anyway. Things are picking up at work. The days ordinarily go at their own pace, items prioritized and re-prioritized depending on what comes up, but this has a tighter deadline. Visibility. And outside of work, I'm trying to write, and edit, and code. Explore geminispace. Practice for my music lessons (two instruments). All our days are finite, but my days feel especially so. Some years, time feels especially tight. Like something constricting around me.
I hope overtime isn't needed. I left my last job because of the constant expectation that they owned any slice of my life that they needed. The company was very ITIL- and process-heavy, so there were a number of release windows every week, designed to minimize any impact whatsoever on users and maximize the inconvenience on the people actually doing the deploys. Wednesdays/Thursdays at 11pm. Sundays at 6 am. And these could go for hours, especially if your automated tests had dependencies on other deploys going on. There were times my deploy would finish at 2, or 3. I'd still have to get up at 6. That knocked me sideways for days. And naturally, I was still expected to write code and think clearly.
Over time, I worked to restructure the deployments of several applications in my team's portfolio to zero downtime so that we could deploy during the day. But not all. And then after almost a decade of weekly (or twice-weekly) deploys, being on-call, being called by on-call, having a reputation for solving problems quickly and being called at the request of some director or other, I decided enough was enough.
Almost ten years ago, one of my friends quit the same company, not that long after we'd both started. He had gone on paternity leave, came back, and was reassigned from the big, high-profile systems renewal project to what was essentially maintenance work. It felt like a demotion. It sort of was? He was crushed.
I remember us walking downtown at lunch. "I refuse to believe this is as good as it gets," he told me, and those exact words have made their home in the back of my head ever since.
When I was in my 20s, I found it easy not to care about work-life balance as I tried to put together the life I envisioned - a relationship where I was treated well, and vice versa; a stable place to live; nice things, and savings to weather hard times. But then decades passed. I've entered my 17th year as a developer. Almost half my career done. And I've seen people drop out of my life for various reasons, friends dying desperately young, and I've come to realize nobody ascends to the Kingdom of Heaven thinking, "shit, I should've banked more OT." I remember looking at some Jira or other and thinking, in disgust, "nobody cares about this."
So we'll hit the timelines. I'll make sure of it. Then hopefully my focus can come back to creativity, love, and music. Given everything going on right now, those feel like good things to want.