During the second-half of 2007, I did a brief stint at a bank - which was exactly the wrong time to be starting a career at a bank. As you may recall, this was right when the mortgage crisis was beginning to come about, and it lasted into 2009. While I was only there for 6 months to the day, I got to watch the stock value plummet to ~10% of what it was when I started. Within the next couple years long after I left, the bank was purchased by another bank and MANY people lost tons of money on the deal.
How is any of this relevant to my next story?
I was originally brought in (along with one other person) to be part of a new group within the Middleware Management and Support team, specifically to assist with doing research and development into new uses for WebSphere Application Servers. My role was to assist with the development of systems that would improve the throughput of EFTs (Electronic Funds Transfers) between the mainframe and the downstream ATMs and Web endpoints. However, just as I was about to join the team, this project went on hold due to the IT Architecture team deciding to begin development using Weblogic instead. With this, my role immediately changed from building and testing WebSphere in new applications, to just maintaining the existing WebSphere systems like the rest of the team. The problem was, there was already a team of people that supported the existing WebSphere environment, and between the shift in technology focus away from that team and the sudden downturn of the stock market, they were reluctant to want to show the new guys the ropes.
Humans have an innate sense of impending doom which fires up long before the rational part of the brain realizes what is happening. This then engages the fight or flight response in order to preserve oneself. The way this was demonstrated within my team, was relegating myself and my other new coworker to the most basic of tasks, and barely lifting a figure to get us pointed in the right direction. They were afraid training us would train themselves out of their jobs; in hindsight, they were probably correct.
I was literally given one real, personally-assigned project to work on independently, and this was to create an inventory of the existing WebSphere Application Servers. Mind you, the WebSphere servers numbered in the hundreds, and people had long since lost track of what they all were, which ones were still in use, and basically what was even still powered on. Being the resourceful type, and also BORED OUT OF MY MIND, I decided to think of ways that I might be able to automate the process and - most importantly - save myself time if I ever had to do this again.
I've always said that the best programmers I've known are the laziest. This may sound counterintuitive on the surface, but in reality, it is the fact that they are lazy that they seek ways to avoid having to perform repetitive tasks. Logging into hundreds of servers and running a command to see if WebSphere is installed, then document the version number, is the pinnacle of repetitive tasks.
Fortunately, this assignment (which I assume was just intended to be busy-work keeping me occupied anyway) came with no instructions for how they wanted it completed, nor a deadline for when it was to be completed. And so, I took this as an opportunity to learn some new skills and create the best damn inventory process possible.
Continued in Part 2...
No comments:
Post a Comment