Shouting Into Space - Work

Lesson Learned...

nospam@example.com (Latcarf) — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 01:06:14 -0700

In the little over seven years that I've been employed at my present job, I've had a total of 14 managers. That's nearly one every six months. Each time I got a review from a manager, I was told how exceptionally well I performed and how it would be impossible to do what we do without me (or something to that effect). Typically, this was true.

During my tenure, some managers gave me good bonuses or a raise here and there. Other managers didn't. Some managers were complete assholes or total bitches and others were great people just trying to do right and not lose a limb (or their head) in the process (though a few still did).

Usually, it took about a month or two to train a new manager on where I was, where I'd been, where I was going, and how fast I'd get there. Generally, most managers were only able to deal with one or two of those variables. The more important thing, in their minds, was making sure they looked good to their managers. Somehow they forgot (or never knew) that well cared for, productive employees can make any manager look good to their boss!

In the next month or two, my manager would learn how many little, behind the scenes things I was doing to keep the automated orchestra playing flawlessly. Slowly, they'd understand the necessity of a good SCM engineer and start to put well placed trust in me. Anytime I thought it might be nice to venture out into something different (like development, or project management, or marketing), I'd bring it up with my manager and usually be give "20%" of my time to work on new tasks.

Inevitably, releases come, then patches, coupled with constant tech support to my group of developers, and of course, myriad regular SCM duties. The "20%" of my time dwindles down to an effective 0%!

So, after all this time. I've left my company for another. As I embark on solving a new set of challenges, I'll try to remember the lesson learned from my last seven years of work:

Don't be irreplaceable, if you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted.

I'd always thought it would assure the consistent availability of my position were I to make myself irreplacable. Indeed, I spent a considerable amount of energy to ensure it took me to deliver our prodcts. Well, there is no doubt my efforts certainly ensured my position, but the side-effects were so restrictive as to be stunting. I've glad I've broken free of that suffocating situation.

I'll apply what I've learned to my future endeavors.

Moving from CVS to SVN - Jumping Off

nospam@example.com (Latcarf) — Tue, 14 Dec 2004 11:35:57 -0800

I work as a Software Configuration Management (SCM) Engineer at a fairly large company who just happens to make a couple of widely used applications for Macintosh. As the person who is responsible for the source code repository (among many other things), I am burdened with providing the developers tools to increase their productivity and efficiency.

To that end, we have decided that we might want to make the move from CVS to Subversion. In other blog entries, I will chronicle the pilot and eventual move and detail what I experienced during the process.

I am using Making the Jump to Subversion as the "jumping off" point to switch to Subversion.

The following is a short synopsis of that article:

Making the Jump to Subversion by Adam Swift -- Subversion can run standalone or on a network as a repository server with multiple clients. The preferred client/server configuration uses Apache and WebDAV for network communication. It's a powerful alternative to CVS, and Adam Swift shows you the ins and outs in this tutorial.

We'll see how it goes!

Moving from CVS to SVN - Swimming Around

nospam@example.com (Latcarf) — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 17:59:19 -0800

It's become time again for me to revisit my organization's desire to move from CVS to Subversion. I've gotten out a few releases of our products recently and with that work out of the way, I'm getting back to swimming around in Subversion.

This is the third installment in my ongoing detail of the move to Subversion. In the first installment of this series, I spoke about my organization's interest in using Subversion instead of CVS. In the second installment, I detailed how I installed Subversion on Mac OS X (Panther) and how I initiated the process of converting some of our CVS repositories. In this installment, I will go into further detail about interacting with the "mock" Subversion server and the pilot project repositories.

Continue reading "Moving from CVS to SVN - Swimming Around"

Moving from CVS to SVN - Diving In

nospam@example.com (Latcarf) — Mon, 20 Dec 2004 18:22:00 -0800

I started the process to convert our organization's CVS repository to Subversion. I decided to do a mock implementation as my "pilot". I took the CVS repository and made a copy to another machine (Mac OS X 10.3.7) which serves as the "mock" Subversion server.

Our current CVS repository consists of two "major" projects and 26 small projects (support pieces, tools, scripts, etc). I decided to try to convert one of the major projects to start with.

Continue reading "Moving from CVS to SVN - Diving In"