Show me the door

It's now been deleted, but originally posted at http://ryanbigg.com/2010/06/wheres-the-love/

Where’s the love? by Radar I get it. I fucking get it.

We’re just the “backend” guys. We make sure everything’s running smoothly so you can get the money from our awesome members to win an EBay auction to send a refugee-now-Australian-resident surfing with who could be the next prime minister. Yes, this is a monumental achievement. I fucking get it. I am happy for you that you raised that much money in a week and it’s your biggest media coverage week of ALL TIME.

I fucking get it.

When the site received the massive traffic it did last night, who was there at 10pm to figure out what the fuck happened? The Online team. Rain or shine, the Online team are the only team who are capable of determining what happened to the website and then fixing the problem so it doesn’t happen again. And that’s what the other members of the team did. Pats on the back all round the next morning. Everything is fucking peachy. Good work, Online.

But that system’s old. It’s written in PHP for God’s sake. Have you seen the code? It’s ugly. It’s barely maintainable and it’s ramshackled. That’s why you hired me. So we could re-write the site in Ruby on Rails. I’m training your guys to be elite Ruby on Rails ninjas. They’re smart guys. They’re learning, and at a rapid pace too.

So then you go and pull off one of “my” Rails devs to work back on the “v2″ site. Yeah, I’m fine with that. Sure. You’ve got to make sure that’s ok for the election. I fucking get it. Yeah, one of the other developers is out with very severe RSI. He was too awesome. Or maybe one of you two (him, or you) worked him too hard. Or maybe you didn’t and he was already prone to this. Whatever.

That leaves us three: the empathetic manager and The Other Developer, and me. Fine. I fucking get it. We’ll still keep plodding along on v3.

Hey, did you hear about the fabulous progress we made this week? The Other Developer has finished what I think is one of the best features of the system: email blast previewing. Oh, you’ve got a campaign to run. Never mind, we’ll do the meeting another day. You’re busy. I fucking get it. The work I, The Other Other Developer, have been doing? I’ve “wrestled with the beast” known as PayPal all week, and won late this afternoon against everything it could throw at me. Let me tell you: PayPal is not nice to developers. It was a medium-stress-level week, but I just kept plodding along. And now it’s done. It just needs the UI tidied up and it’s ready to present.

Whenever you have the time. Oh. You’re running another campaign. That’s fine. We’ll do the meeting another day. You’re busy. I fucking get it.

But you had a busy week this week, didn’t you? Good on you for everything you’ve done. Seriously. You fucking rock! When I hear family members say they’ve not only seen you on the TV, but read about you damn near everywhere, I feel I’m contributing to something amazing. Good stuff.

Then comes the weekly team meeting where we share our triumphs for this week. It’s usually held at 4pm on the Friday. But this week’s meeting was different. It was pushed back to 4:30 because you were so busy. Alright, so I worked on that Last Failing Test that always seems to hang around when I merge. Conquered that too. Oh look, it’s 4:45. Ok, meeting’s coming soon. I’ll just catch up on the news of the day because to start anything now will not be worthwhile in this state of tiredness.

Then 5:00 comes around. No meeting.

5:15. Bam. Meeting.

Campaigns team kicked ass this week. Good stuff. We had donations coming out of ears. People singing our praises. Press galore!

Nobody asked what the Online team did this week.

Nobody asked what the Online team is going to do next week.

I could come in and make it look like I was doing work by working on my book instead and you wouldn’t know the difference. But I won’t do that. That’s stupid and not what I’m being paid for. I fucking get it.

So how about showing some love next week? How about taking a break from your extraordinary lives and asking us “how are things are going?” “Is there anything you need my advice on?” “When would be a good time for you to schedule the meeting so we can go through the changes as a team?”

Show some love, or show me the door.