Work Frustrations
I wrote the rant below and hesitated to post it. I decided that I would after editing it to remove any mentions of the name and location of the company and any employees I mentioned in the previous draft. I will not divulge any of that information in this or any follow up posts or comments so please don’t ask. Anyway, enjoy the rant:
My frustration at my current job came on strong this morning when preparing a status update with a colleague after I realized that I’ve been here for almost 7 weeks and haven’t entered a single bug report on the project that I was brought here to test. There are several reasons why I haven’t entered any bug reports but the target audience of this status report will just see a big fat zero to my credit (or, more properly, my liability) without knowing these reasons. While I set out to find a way to communicate the reasons in a meaningful and productive way the frustrations I have had as a result of them came to the fore.
My annoyances with this company started the day of my interview. I found that I was very uncomfortable with the neighborhood the office was in. I actually felt unsafe while walking to the building before the interview and back to my car after it. I actually felt like I was in imminent danger.
When I got to the interview I was lead through a maze of hallways to get to the office in which the interview would be held. The building seemed old and second rate. It was also not lit very well and appeared to be dirty. It had me thinking that either the company (or it’s parent) couldn’t afford a better office space or just didn’t care. (I now think that it’s the latter but don’t rule out the former.)
There were other things that bothered from interview day but I put them all aside while the interview was actually going on and actually had a pretty good interview, if I do say so myself.
An offer came shortly after the interview and I remember thinking that in a better economy the first impression I got from the interview would have been enough for me to turn down the job. However this wasn’t a better economy and I was unemployed so I said yes and started before the end of the week. The company had seemed very eager to get me in before the new year so this aspect worked out well for both parties.
When I showed up on my first day I was shown to the space where my workstation was. That space was (and still is) located in the kitchen. I understand the lack of space many companies experience at times during their development so I behaved graciously despite being annoyed by this. (At a previous job I spent several months in a small conference room with four other people so I was no stranger to working in a less than optimal environment.) But over the several weeks I’ve been there it’s gotten increasingly frustrating to sit in this location. As people come in to get coffee, heat their lunches in the microwave, get water, etc. they seem uncaring that there is actually someone working in there. I understand that the kitchen is a common area that people will need to come in and out of at any time but the least they could do is try to keep their voices to an acceptable level so the people working there (that’s right, I’m not the only one working in the kitchen) can focus on their tasks. And don’t get me started on what happens if someone brings in donuts, cookies or cake. Let’s just say this room can sometimes be a madhouse of noise.
But I digress. I was introduced to a couple of people working on the project that I was supposed to be working on. They were nice people but I soon learned that they are lousy communicators. Would it hurt to answer an email occasionally? These are people on the management level of the project. I understand that they are busy with scheduling and resource management and the like but I’m one of their resources and I’m not getting anything that can help me do my job because they’re not answering my questions.
There was a timetable set to start a beta of the application I was working on the week after what would be my sixth week on the job. It took almost 5 weeks to get me any documentation on what I would be testing. And then it was only basic documentation that was actually more generic to the platform they were building on top of than it was specific to any functionality they were building on top of the platform. In other words there was nothing for me to learn from the little documentation I got.
It wasn’t until the sixth week that I actually got to play with the application. The app was installed in an environment they were referring to as UAT (that means User Acceptance Testing for those non developers reading this) since this was the environment they were going to use for a limited beta test. (Note that this is not a QA environment. They don’t have a QA environment.) But I wasn’t given the go ahead to start my own testing since the environment wasn’t stable enough. As I was playing with things I realized that the lack of stability was actually more reminiscent of a development environment in the very early stages of development than it was of any environment I have ever seen that was to be used by even the smallest subset of end users (as they had planned to use this environment).
We’re now in week seven, the week the app is supposed to go into limited beta. Though it was never specifically communicated to me I have learned through back channels that I’m supposed to have been testing for the last two weeks. And though I’ve been poking around the app since the day it was opened up to me I haven’t been able to get any information on the internally developed features for it. The functionality that I’ve been playing with has all been basic generic functions of the platform. Any bugs that I have run across are of that ilk had previously been reported by someone else. I obviously need more information about the internally developed functionality since that’s what they brought me here to test. But I can’t that since nobody is communicating. I can’t even get someone to tell me if they actually started the beta they’ve been so staunch about starting this week.
This is turning out to be a very frustrating assignment and I am eagerly waiting for it to end. (Though I hope I have a new job to step right into when this one ends.)
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