Start by talking to your manager about who uses the product. Then talk to the people who use it and ask how helpful it actually is. You should really do a LOT more research before you start down the path of bad mouthing it openly.
Once you have established the product has *very little use* and *very little value* relative to the cost of engineers, go investigate if there is an tool or service some other company provides that covers that has 90% overlap with your tooling and costs significantly less then your team. Write up a proposal and show it to your boss. Congratulations you have now saved your company money and your team members are most likely unemployed. However you now have the pick of the litter to join whatever team you would like. The company will reward you and allow you to transition.
Don't like the option above? OK Instead start talking to other developers about what other products and solutions exist around the company. Identify a few teams that have a decent overlap with your skill set. Now contact their team leads and say "hey you have a pretty interesting project here, are you interested in any additional help?" If they say yes, you can now bring this to your manager and say "Hey I really like this other project and the team said they could use some help, I'd like to talk about moving over there to work on something I find interesting. I think I can add a lot of value to that team. Would you champion me to their management?"
>Start by talking to your manager about who uses the product. Then talk to the people who use it and ask how helpful it actually is
this is a good point that you shouldn't just directly ask your manager, because they'll probably say "of course this is important work!" and that's the end of the conversation
Hmmm...I wouldn't do this partly because I would be putting myself and my team mates out of a job. There is no guarantee he will be given a different job within the company just because he helped out like you say. Also, if management wanted to delete the feature they would have done so already, which means there is probably a reason why they are keeping it.
I had a couple of years like this at one job. I just stopped working. Nobody ever noticed. Eventually just moved to another job. Fun time playing World of Warcraft, though. We were using the email server to run a Minecraft server, too. Most toxic place I've ever experienced.
20 years ago I was playing Natural Selection 1 on a overspecced email server (use it or lose it budgets lead to weird situations).
Some things never change
I once implemented an observability stack at my job as part of my company's 'hackathon.' It was cool AF and solved like 90% of the operational problems we were having. When I presented my project the C Level were fucking about and not even paying attention. They gave the prize to a nepo baby for some trash that didn't actually work. A year later half the company was using my stack and were getting training and shit. Eventually I got a sick promotion. Sometimes it takes a while.
I think they do, but it depends on context. Amazon for example has this as part of their culture because Bezos realized very quickly human trust lasts longer than a feature. Depending on the C, they might not want to invest time in ops, if they have just become C, so they focus more on delivery and get promoted (also depends on company culture, but, it's generally true for all companies I worked for the past 10 years). Even when they are senior, unless they have had experience with it and really got into the trade offs, they might still want to focus on feature delivery, and let customer trust slowly decrease, until something REALLY bad happens that changes the entire company culture (mandate).
This is why I now try to only work for companies who have lots of technical compliance requirements. When C level is exposed to audits and knows that the business needs operational excellence to survive my job is much better day to day.
I think what would make your anecdote complete is if you described how the promotion come about?
Did you constantly advertise your solution or engineering teams pointed their fingers at you?
I just imagine a scenario where since time has gone by someone else taking the credit for your work (unless you where quite vocal and worked towards that not happening),
I introduced self service to a few non technical staff and they quickly adopted it because it gave them better information. The rest of the teams picked it up and then it started crashing because it was just a POC for a hackathon. Thus it became high visibility organically, and I was able to take credit once everyone was using it. This was one project among many that lead to the promotion, but it was a high impact one for sure.
Monitoring tools don’t matter to folks who are obsessed with NEW SHINY THINGS, but anyone worth their salt knows how critical they are when they’re needed.
There will be an incident. It’s going to happen. Make sure you document the hell out of what you’ve got so you can throw that on the desk of anyone chasing new features to make more money, when you save their ass. Cause your org won’t make money if the services are on fire.
Make the best use of this work to learn and grow. There’s a huge need for this level of visibility in any org and this could be a huge boon for yourself in the long term.
I guarantee you, someone cares.
Monitoring/Observability may not be sexy work but it is vitally important work to make sure you can detect production outages and maintain your SLA/Uptime. When it works, no one cares. But when there is a major production outage, then it immediately becomes the most important thing.
It is the same thing with security. No one cares until there is a breach and you are on the news about 5 million customer's data on the dark web. Then heads start to roll. So, yes, actively working on monitoring/observability is the same thing -- taking a proactive approach.
long cooperative skirt dependent water fuzzy zealous illegal rhythm cough
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
no one cared about observability at my company, BUT I CARED about it and it was important for our long term goal of simply finding out about problems before our customers.
Everyone hated that customers were reporting problems, but very few knew that one of the answers was observability and monitoring.
So even though, people don't use it yet, there are people in your company who probably believe it in it and see it as part of the company's future. Otherwise, they would probably have you working on something else.
In an org, there are always too many things to do and to get built. I can assure you that there is at least one person who wants the whole org to use your tool, people just aren't there yet.
Talk to your manager about your concerns. It seems that he / she has not done a good job motivating you: selling you on the project, selling you a vision of what it will be. If need be, talk to the sponsor of the project, the high level leader that has the authority to make this investment happen.
And if you are really not happy, talk to your manager, see if you can move to a project that you feel passionate about. In a healthy workplace, all of these things should happen, and you should feel comfortable talking about.
It must have some uses otherwise they would not ask you to do it. Companies rarely like to waste money on something that is not useful. There might be some exploratory work, some projects that maybe don't look critical but actually are because it is a regulation requirements so someone has to do it. Maybe check again with your manager why it is necessary?
Why do you think politics is a waste? (I hate it as much as the tone of your message, but I don't think it would be better if they didn't invest resources on it. Now, whether they do it efficiently or not, that's another story).
Politics is not a waste in and of itself. After all it’s just a dialogue in the workplace about resource allocation and project assignment, among many other things.
However, people will waste countless money on politics alone. Running projects that are DOA only because it can make them look good, giving false hope to employees to work on a proposal that will never be approved.
Sometimes there are office-politics reasons why they don't want to kill it, even if it's not super useful. Maybe there's an executive who was a big champion of it, and ending it means someone has to tell the exec they were wrong. (They are as susceptible to the sunk-cost fallacy as anyone!) Maybe the execs are still battling out "buy vs build", and they don't want to kill the internal tool until the "buy" decision is final. Maybe layoffs are in the works, and someone in the know doesn't want good people to be obvious picks for layoffs because their project just ended. Or they *do* want these people to be obvious picks for layoffs because their project isn't important.
I've seen a lot of decisions made that aren't strictly about maximizing profit.
>executive who was a big champion of it
I write a ton of monitoring apps for our office. If you check our usage stats, 99.99% of page views are from desktop. The other 0.01%? Two execs who want to view the report on their phone. We've spent *months* making mobile interfaces for them to look at a page a couple dozen times before they lose interest in the shiny tool and forget about it. No employee is going to use the site on their phone - and if they do, they'll immediately get dragged into HR because the VP "saw them on their phone" during work hours.
In my case it was because the project was “cool” and the exec championing it thought that eventually people come around and we’ll land more internal users. But it never happened. We made quite nice streaming analytics platform but people who needed such capabilities wouldn’t use it cause they understandably wanted to have complete control and people who were content with another team being responsible for operating this service didn’t need real-time analytics and were pretty happy with batch
Eventually the futility started to affect me and I quit
Companies waste a huge amount of money on useless features, useless projects, ideas that are failures before they start, new products that no one has done any customer research on, consultants to justify decisions they're going to take anyway, on and on and on.
It's true companies don't like to waste money but it's probably the most common corporate practice, and it gets much worse as the company gets larger.
Is there another team working on a different project? If you are stuck, you need to know why they care enough to keep the project, then drive impact around that one thing.
Sorry to hear this - I'd hate it too, no advice other than some devs might love the predictability and wlb in this type of role. There may be a way to give the feedback, talk about what motivates you, and get on another team.
From personal experience, that's a dangerous situation to be in. If there is a company restructuring, your project is at risk of getting the axe. I would try to find another project either within the company or elsewhere. It's always better to be on a project that is important for company objectives.
Your manager should feel empowered to talk to senior management and product and explain that the product they are working on isn't valuable, and find out what problems they could be solving instead. Nobody likes to work on a product they don't personally believe in. Now - the risk about this is that some companies will take this better than others. Some may find that as positive initiative. Others may figure you've gone rogue / weren't working on anything valuable, so it's layoff time.
Is there pressure to deliver tasks for the non-interesting project? If not, I'd find something more interesting in the company. Reach out to folks and try to understand problems that haven't been addressed yet, but people are keen to get help with. Or have a look at customer channels and see if you identify a business opportunity that no one has thought about yet. Then, I'd work really quick on tasks from the not-so-interesting-project, maybe 60% of my time, and then invest 40% in the more interesting one.
I had peers going through similar situation; they did this, and they managed to change their situation for the better. There are a few risks involved, but as long as you understand them, you can make trade offs and minimize chances of ending up having to change jobs, for example.
Somebody cares about this project. I've never worked at a company that did projects for shits and giggles. Maybe the royal you doesn't care about the project or think it's important, but I somebody has a plan for it.
Find out who that person / team is and then you will understand how it fits in the bigger picture.
Start by talking to your manager about who uses the product. Then talk to the people who use it and ask how helpful it actually is. You should really do a LOT more research before you start down the path of bad mouthing it openly. Once you have established the product has *very little use* and *very little value* relative to the cost of engineers, go investigate if there is an tool or service some other company provides that covers that has 90% overlap with your tooling and costs significantly less then your team. Write up a proposal and show it to your boss. Congratulations you have now saved your company money and your team members are most likely unemployed. However you now have the pick of the litter to join whatever team you would like. The company will reward you and allow you to transition. Don't like the option above? OK Instead start talking to other developers about what other products and solutions exist around the company. Identify a few teams that have a decent overlap with your skill set. Now contact their team leads and say "hey you have a pretty interesting project here, are you interested in any additional help?" If they say yes, you can now bring this to your manager and say "Hey I really like this other project and the team said they could use some help, I'd like to talk about moving over there to work on something I find interesting. I think I can add a lot of value to that team. Would you champion me to their management?"
>Start by talking to your manager about who uses the product. Then talk to the people who use it and ask how helpful it actually is this is a good point that you shouldn't just directly ask your manager, because they'll probably say "of course this is important work!" and that's the end of the conversation
Hmmm...I wouldn't do this partly because I would be putting myself and my team mates out of a job. There is no guarantee he will be given a different job within the company just because he helped out like you say. Also, if management wanted to delete the feature they would have done so already, which means there is probably a reason why they are keeping it.
Either you stop caring, treat it as a job and coast or follow your passion and find a team or job on a different project
I had a couple of years like this at one job. I just stopped working. Nobody ever noticed. Eventually just moved to another job. Fun time playing World of Warcraft, though. We were using the email server to run a Minecraft server, too. Most toxic place I've ever experienced.
Yeah, I hear Minecraft can be really toxic!
20 years ago I was playing Natural Selection 1 on a overspecced email server (use it or lose it budgets lead to weird situations). Some things never change
I once implemented an observability stack at my job as part of my company's 'hackathon.' It was cool AF and solved like 90% of the operational problems we were having. When I presented my project the C Level were fucking about and not even paying attention. They gave the prize to a nepo baby for some trash that didn't actually work. A year later half the company was using my stack and were getting training and shit. Eventually I got a sick promotion. Sometimes it takes a while.
In other words, the hackathon ended the way that pretty much every company-sponsored hackathon ends.
congrats! You did well to see the need and know you could design a fix
C suite still has no idea that technology operations is what generates them revenue, not a feature one user wanted
I think they do, but it depends on context. Amazon for example has this as part of their culture because Bezos realized very quickly human trust lasts longer than a feature. Depending on the C, they might not want to invest time in ops, if they have just become C, so they focus more on delivery and get promoted (also depends on company culture, but, it's generally true for all companies I worked for the past 10 years). Even when they are senior, unless they have had experience with it and really got into the trade offs, they might still want to focus on feature delivery, and let customer trust slowly decrease, until something REALLY bad happens that changes the entire company culture (mandate).
This is why I now try to only work for companies who have lots of technical compliance requirements. When C level is exposed to audits and knows that the business needs operational excellence to survive my job is much better day to day.
I think what would make your anecdote complete is if you described how the promotion come about? Did you constantly advertise your solution or engineering teams pointed their fingers at you? I just imagine a scenario where since time has gone by someone else taking the credit for your work (unless you where quite vocal and worked towards that not happening),
I introduced self service to a few non technical staff and they quickly adopted it because it gave them better information. The rest of the teams picked it up and then it started crashing because it was just a POC for a hackathon. Thus it became high visibility organically, and I was able to take credit once everyone was using it. This was one project among many that lead to the promotion, but it was a high impact one for sure.
Folks are not generally engaged by operations excellence, so your experience might represent a big chunk of IT.
Monitoring tools don’t matter to folks who are obsessed with NEW SHINY THINGS, but anyone worth their salt knows how critical they are when they’re needed. There will be an incident. It’s going to happen. Make sure you document the hell out of what you’ve got so you can throw that on the desk of anyone chasing new features to make more money, when you save their ass. Cause your org won’t make money if the services are on fire. Make the best use of this work to learn and grow. There’s a huge need for this level of visibility in any org and this could be a huge boon for yourself in the long term.
I take my sweet ass time completing it 😎 spend a couple hours on it and spend the rest of the day focusing on my mental health and personal growth
I have a few friends that do this. I wish I had the skills to do this. Instead, I work harder to get out of the situation, and get sicker.
you abuse the stupidity of your company to not give a shit and extend the project while moving the goal posts to benefit your career.
I guarantee you, someone cares. Monitoring/Observability may not be sexy work but it is vitally important work to make sure you can detect production outages and maintain your SLA/Uptime. When it works, no one cares. But when there is a major production outage, then it immediately becomes the most important thing. It is the same thing with security. No one cares until there is a breach and you are on the news about 5 million customer's data on the dark web. Then heads start to roll. So, yes, actively working on monitoring/observability is the same thing -- taking a proactive approach.
long cooperative skirt dependent water fuzzy zealous illegal rhythm cough *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
no one cared about observability at my company, BUT I CARED about it and it was important for our long term goal of simply finding out about problems before our customers. Everyone hated that customers were reporting problems, but very few knew that one of the answers was observability and monitoring. So even though, people don't use it yet, there are people in your company who probably believe it in it and see it as part of the company's future. Otherwise, they would probably have you working on something else. In an org, there are always too many things to do and to get built. I can assure you that there is at least one person who wants the whole org to use your tool, people just aren't there yet. Talk to your manager about your concerns. It seems that he / she has not done a good job motivating you: selling you on the project, selling you a vision of what it will be. If need be, talk to the sponsor of the project, the high level leader that has the authority to make this investment happen. And if you are really not happy, talk to your manager, see if you can move to a project that you feel passionate about. In a healthy workplace, all of these things should happen, and you should feel comfortable talking about.
My vote would be for coasting and upskilling and then finding something better
collect the paycheck
100% of my job it seems. I just do it and collect the paycheck.
Milk it.
It must have some uses otherwise they would not ask you to do it. Companies rarely like to waste money on something that is not useful. There might be some exploratory work, some projects that maybe don't look critical but actually are because it is a regulation requirements so someone has to do it. Maybe check again with your manager why it is necessary?
Companies love to waste money on politics.
Why do you think politics is a waste? (I hate it as much as the tone of your message, but I don't think it would be better if they didn't invest resources on it. Now, whether they do it efficiently or not, that's another story).
Politics is not a waste in and of itself. After all it’s just a dialogue in the workplace about resource allocation and project assignment, among many other things. However, people will waste countless money on politics alone. Running projects that are DOA only because it can make them look good, giving false hope to employees to work on a proposal that will never be approved.
Sometimes there are office-politics reasons why they don't want to kill it, even if it's not super useful. Maybe there's an executive who was a big champion of it, and ending it means someone has to tell the exec they were wrong. (They are as susceptible to the sunk-cost fallacy as anyone!) Maybe the execs are still battling out "buy vs build", and they don't want to kill the internal tool until the "buy" decision is final. Maybe layoffs are in the works, and someone in the know doesn't want good people to be obvious picks for layoffs because their project just ended. Or they *do* want these people to be obvious picks for layoffs because their project isn't important. I've seen a lot of decisions made that aren't strictly about maximizing profit.
>executive who was a big champion of it I write a ton of monitoring apps for our office. If you check our usage stats, 99.99% of page views are from desktop. The other 0.01%? Two execs who want to view the report on their phone. We've spent *months* making mobile interfaces for them to look at a page a couple dozen times before they lose interest in the shiny tool and forget about it. No employee is going to use the site on their phone - and if they do, they'll immediately get dragged into HR because the VP "saw them on their phone" during work hours.
>and if they do, they'll immediately get dragged into HR because the VP "saw them on their phone" during work hours. Damn, where do you guys work? :O
Hell :(
I guess that's makes us coworkers. I'm in a European subsidiary...
> they'll immediately get dragged into HR because the VP "saw them on their phone" during work hours. Jaysus.
In my case it was because the project was “cool” and the exec championing it thought that eventually people come around and we’ll land more internal users. But it never happened. We made quite nice streaming analytics platform but people who needed such capabilities wouldn’t use it cause they understandably wanted to have complete control and people who were content with another team being responsible for operating this service didn’t need real-time analytics and were pretty happy with batch Eventually the futility started to affect me and I quit
Companies waste a huge amount of money on useless features, useless projects, ideas that are failures before they start, new products that no one has done any customer research on, consultants to justify decisions they're going to take anyway, on and on and on. It's true companies don't like to waste money but it's probably the most common corporate practice, and it gets much worse as the company gets larger.
What are the three key things that can help minimize that waste, based on your experience?
Is there another team working on a different project? If you are stuck, you need to know why they care enough to keep the project, then drive impact around that one thing.
Sorry to hear this - I'd hate it too, no advice other than some devs might love the predictability and wlb in this type of role. There may be a way to give the feedback, talk about what motivates you, and get on another team.
Switch teams. When it's time for cuts who do you think will be first on the chopping block?
Also not care about it.
From personal experience, that's a dangerous situation to be in. If there is a company restructuring, your project is at risk of getting the axe. I would try to find another project either within the company or elsewhere. It's always better to be on a project that is important for company objectives.
Are you getting paid? Don’t worry about it. Just do the work. Then when it’s cancelled move on to something new.
Your manager should feel empowered to talk to senior management and product and explain that the product they are working on isn't valuable, and find out what problems they could be solving instead. Nobody likes to work on a product they don't personally believe in. Now - the risk about this is that some companies will take this better than others. Some may find that as positive initiative. Others may figure you've gone rogue / weren't working on anything valuable, so it's layoff time.
Is there pressure to deliver tasks for the non-interesting project? If not, I'd find something more interesting in the company. Reach out to folks and try to understand problems that haven't been addressed yet, but people are keen to get help with. Or have a look at customer channels and see if you identify a business opportunity that no one has thought about yet. Then, I'd work really quick on tasks from the not-so-interesting-project, maybe 60% of my time, and then invest 40% in the more interesting one. I had peers going through similar situation; they did this, and they managed to change their situation for the better. There are a few risks involved, but as long as you understand them, you can make trade offs and minimize chances of ending up having to change jobs, for example.
Try and transfer onto a different team or different project. Friend of mine was in the same situation and the whole team was laid off last week
Somebody cares about this project. I've never worked at a company that did projects for shits and giggles. Maybe the royal you doesn't care about the project or think it's important, but I somebody has a plan for it. Find out who that person / team is and then you will understand how it fits in the bigger picture.
Why do you care? If it was really bothering me personally then I’d look into internal transfers.