The End of the World: 2020-2021

Spring of 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic hit. I was still working for a medical implants manufacturer, and since all non-essential surgeries were cancelled, my employer’s sales figures were heavily impacted. As a result, they had to lay-off a few dozen employees. Being a contractor, I feared that I would be let go. However, I was relieved to learn that since I was in an R&D role, that my job was safe.

The CIO asked me if I would be willing to take over the maintenance of the company’s global web presence and online product catalog and I agreed to help out. She was smart, optimistic, and I really valued her feedback to make me feel genuinely appreciated.

I inherited a project that had accumulated a great deal of negativity and pessimism. The previous designer and developer had a difficult working relationship and my sense is that the developer did not enjoy their role. Also, I think that he was in the midst of intense burnout that was impacting his productivity. The designer was either fired or quit. The developer maligned the software platform to his colleagues, and this affected the morale of the entire web team. I found out that years back, my friend Loren who was working as a project manager and my programmer colleague had asked to be removed from maintaining the company web presence because of how stressful it was to work on it.

I inherited another project that was also in a bad spot. Prior to the CIO joining the company, there was no central coordination of technology workers and teams worked independently to hire their own programmers and contractors. This project was an iOS app built by contractors that was months behind schedule and was having persistent quality issues.

I stepped into these challenges with a spirit of wanting to help out my new colleagues within this company. I felt that I had the experience needed to shore up technical debt and improve processes in a way to make these projects successful. I felt validated when we finally released the first fully-functioning version of the iOS app. I felt validated when I started being able to address any issue with the website infrastructure in a reasonable time frame and begin establishing improved development practices that stabilized the project and removed the negative aura that it had accumulated over the years.

I was very fortunate to still be employed during the lockdowns. However, I made the perhaps unwise decision to live alone. The resulting extreme isolation and the loss of my music community plunged me into profound depression and anxiety that exacerbated my chronic pain issues. This pain and depression caused me to stop playing many of my favorite instruments. I took up running to deal with the stress and broke a bone in my left foot :[

Challenges in my new role

• Lack of documentation of testing and deployment processes. I addressed this and the person who took over for me shot me a message months later on LinkedIn expressing gratitude for my extensive documentation.
• Lack of buy-in on necessary automated testing for the front-end presence.
• Lack of detail in tracking long-term projects and corresponding lack of written specifications in the issue tracker.
• Being made to feel less-than for being a contractor by a manager that was added to grow the technology team.
• I have found that the quality and speed tradeoffs that result when outsourcing work to an agency can be significant. In my experience, working with agency developers can be like finding yourself suddenly surrounded by coworkers that have not been interviewed, vetted, and tested. I think that it can negatively impact morale if you hire a team of agency developers without consulting your staff developers first and involving them in selecting and vetting the agency developers.
• In both the cases of the website project and the iOS project, I experienced what the outcomes can be when software projects are initiated by teams that are needing deeper technical expertise and technical leadership. When severe quality issues that delay a project can appear, for example, a team that lacks this leadership may not know to recommend unit testing or put in place a rigorous workflow documenting issues in an issue tracker.
• Our web presence was written in WordPress and relied on custom PHP code. I participated in trying to hire senior-level talent to work on this system and it was a struggle. The codebase and project design wasn't bad. We just needed more automated testing support.
• While searching for a senior web developer, we hired someone who raised a couple red flags for both myself and another interviewer. They turned out to communicate in a confrontational and combative manner. Since I was the primary technical contact on web projects, I bore the brunt of their outbursts. It was quite traumatic to have to deal with this in the middle of pandemic lockdowns, political turmoil, and personal life stress. Thankfully, I had the full support of the CIO and HR during this episode.

There were definitely some positives

• I regularly interacted with women more in this role than in any other roles. I love being able to work in teams of women because I feel like I can express myself more genuinely. My gender fluidity and natural tendency towards expressing a more vulnerable, emotional, playful, feminine side make it challenging for me to work in very bro-y male-dominated teams. I tend to feel lonelier and less connected in such teams.
• Even though I don’t want to be a full-time manager, it was a good experience to be able to exercise my managerial skills. It was really satisfying to be able to rescue and stabilize two different projects.
• I had the opportunity to mentor a really smart and talented intern. I was super proud to see him be able to step into a full developer role only months afterward.
• I had really satisfying working relationships with several of my new coworkers including the CIO.
• The CIO granted me a raise when I asked for one. This let me save up money for a downpayment and repairs on a home. The previous “big boss”, a CTO, would not give me this raise.

I ultimately decided to leave the role for a few different reasons. I was experiencing signs of burnout again. At one point I asked to take two weeks off because my stress and burnout was so bad and I didn’t really have the energy to plan any kind of vacation. I cut my working hours to 25 hours a week. I didn’t feel respected by the manager that had taken over direct supervision of me from my CIO.

Early on, I let my CIO know that I had the intention of leaving my role but that I would take my time and make sure that the transition went as smooth as possible. I put feelers out on my network and I found out that the CTO from my Utah role was hiring again! I reached out and we began the interview / hiring process.

A few months passed, but suddenly my job became sharply stressful – my programmer colleague that I had worked with for seven years gave his two weeks notice. Also, I was informed that we were going to hire an outsourcing firm again and that we wouldn’t be able to send them macOS systems. This meant that I had to try and figure out how to support our Dockerized application on Windows. It quickly became apparent that making this happen was going to require a huge amount of effort or not be possible at all.

Fortunately, I was able to finalize the hiring process for that new role at a company with a very strong mission to make their employees feel happy and productive. I would also get a chance to work with AI and Clojure again :]

Part 7 of My Software Journey

Part 6: Going Rogue: 2014 - 2020