The Negative Voice
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2001-01-26 - 3:37:06 PM

No Future Operations

Well, the word is official now, the Product From Hell is dead.

I'm a lot sadder than I thought I'd be. This could have been a really cool thing. I could have been operations man for an pseudo-ISP with a million users. Instead it was a total fustercluck, a true boondoggle. And I've spent the last 20 months of my life working my ass off for nothing more concrete than a reputation for valor in defeat.

I don't feed real bad about my own role in the mess. I was valorous in defeat, dammit. Everyone on my team worked really hard to try to make it work. We went farther, in my opinion, than anyone else in Server Ops ever did to open up their processes to developers and make their lives easy.

Unfortunately there's a level of ineptitude that will fail at any task, no matter how easy you make it. There also seems to be a natural law that makes that level of ineptitude readily available to all those who seek it. After all, you need more than just luck to take an eager customer base and a more-or-less functional prototype and turn it into a total disaster.

I'm torn about what to do next. Part of me wants to go work on something total other, preferably something where the quality of my people will give us success with or without the rest of the company. But I also think that opportunities like the one we just loused up are rare, that the company must be able to exploit them, and that I could probably do some good there. Give me a few engineers and a few tech writers and I could turn out some materials that would radically un-ruin our product development process.

Alas, I can't see the company empowering me to do that anytime soon. I may have to do something quiet in the short term and work toward that in the long term. Maybe it would be a useful stepping stone toward that vice-presidency I've been wanting. Or maybe I'd just annoy a lot of people. Either way, it could be really worthwhile.

I just want to stop being manager of the "No-Future Products Operations Group" now.

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