Just another short blurb tonight (lol).
Just another fantastic day at work today; a colleague had issues with a program he had developed, and QA (quality assurance) was testing; he was informed by QA either late last week or this past Monday that ‘something was wrong’, and I’ve been helping him try to determine the root cause. The irony here is he’s a seasoned cobol programmer (and I’m not), and the program was written in cobol. We would work together for at least a couple of hours each day; I guess this problably started late last week since it seemed we worked on it longer than just the past three days this week.
Anyway, “Hector” was getting extremely frustrating and was sending me chat msgs about how frustrated he was getting and how aggravating this debugging was, and he was getting depressed, with him thinking “I should know this stuff”, etc.
I personally don’t like it when a colleague says these things to me, where a person gets down on himself and beats himself up in front of me (in Chat, or on the phone); just keep those negative thoughts to yourself (I’m not trying to be selfish or not understanding, just don’t bring me down with you, thanks).
Today was at least the third day, and we try this, and we try that, and in some cases, Hector is thinking “we’re going backward”.
Hector, while he’s my team lead, sometimes think of himself as an imposter; he doesn’t feel as smart as the other guys in the dept. I tell him, does xyz know cobol? Could xyz solve this, even though xyz is brilliant – he doesn’t know cobol and so, I tell Hector, in this case, you’re much smarter than xyz; each of us have skills the others don’t have, and each of us also don’t have the same skills as the other guys; but it all balances out; you’re good at leading; hence you’re the team lead, etc. xyz wouldn’t ever be able to lead a team of 4-5 very diverse personalities, without being taken to the scaffold by the team, after his first month at leading the team.
We get on a conference call with a few other guys, and another guy suggests something: “have you tried this, or that”? Well, yes, but, we’ll try it again.
The thing is, we’re setting several options, and sometimes those options don’t “play nice” with each other; and the key is to figure which ones to set, which ones shouldn’t be used, and the various values of those options.
In the middle of all this, hector and I are on a Webex, and I’m watching over his (video) shoulder. When we make a simple change, it then takes ~30 mins to test to see whether it worked or not. And, we’ve been doing that now for more than a couple of dozen times over the last 3-4 days; while we’re waiting, hector again mentions how frustrating this process is.
And I say to him, this is what software development is all about: solving puzzles like this one (of course, I didn’t say: “if you don’t like this type of thing, you shouldn’t be in this profession”, and/or “after thirty/forty yrs of doing this – you should be used to stuff like this”); I don’t get why he’s frustrated…and, what I do say is “I’ll tell you, hector: I don’t let this kind of stuff get to me; the stuff that upsets me is when I have to deal with people whose personalities suck, reminding him of the one numnuts in the dozen person dept. who is narcissistic and a braggart, etc.
I say to hector, once we figure out the correct settings, and we get this darn thing to work, THEN, that is what makes my day, and maybe, at one point we were banging our combined heads on the wall, but when we solve the puzzle, the new sense of accomplishment overwrites the old sense of confusion/frustration.
And, about an hour later, about an hour after we both were “supposed” to leave (day before a holiday, senior mgmt lets us take the preceding afternoon off), we are doing one last test (we had decided, we would do one last test, and then shelve it until Friday morning, if it didn’t work), and, wouldn’t you know, we are watching msgs in our screen, and I see it first: we got it to finally “work”!
And, I then say to hector: if we were in the office, side by side, I’d be high-fiving you right now! That is what I’m talking about, hector: this huge amount of accomplishment that just came over me!
So – I enjoyed working closely with Hector these last several days, and while I taught him some stuff – he also taught me a few things as well. I’ll share this: I’ve been on this new team now for 4-5 months and the thing I like about this team: we collaborate – all the time; we are constantly on the phone with each other. My other team – for the last couple of yrs, it was rare for me to have daily phone conversations with my other co-workers (other than team zoom call). I felt a little out of it, without the daily social interaction.
Anyway, it was a really good week – even though I spent a lot of time helping Hector, I also got a lot of my stuff completed and checked off my to-do assignment list.
Yay me. I love my job; I love what I’m doing. 🤓🖥️⌨️💻🎉🎊
