Ninety-nine percent of the time I like my job. Or... have liked my job.
But if you'll forgive me the opportunity to vent here a little bit, sometimes
bureaucracy can be incredibly annoying.
You ever heard the expression that it's easier to get forgiveness than permission?
At my job, neither is easy. Or quick. And it's the latter part that kills me sometimes.
Friday evening, one of the public-facing machines I administer spat up some
filesystem warnings. It could be nothing important, or it could be the first
signs of something big. I don't know.
The sensible, logical thing to do is to reboot it and force a fsck.
I email my boss, asking if this is okay. It's nine o'clock at night.
Twelve hours later I get a reply: don't do anything until I run it past
everyone on Monday morning.
They're not intentionally being a dick. It's just Asian corporate bureaucracy
at its finest.
This is literally what they pay me to do - keep the servers running. And yet
every time something needs to be done... hurry up and wait.
I like my job, don't get me wrong. It's fun, it's challenging, and it used to
be rewarding, before the exchange rates went to hell.
I'm not sure I can even blame the company, or the culture. My current manager
is strong on the corporate survival skills... and alarmingly weak on the
technical ones. I often wonder why they're on the hardware side of the company
at all. No, that's not true, I know the answer: their excellent language
skills, lol.
