Tag: Administriva

Dubious victory

Is there really a sense of accomplishment in clearing the “immediate needs” support list just so I have time tomorrow to sit through two classes on secure coding and write my annual self-evaluation?

Definitely unrelated: have I recently grumbled about how much I hate the make-work foo-fah that is the annual self-evaluation? In terms of my actual review and associated merit raise (assuming there are merit raises to be had), it has no weight. I honestly fill these damn things out hoping that I’m not too far above or below where my manager is going to rate me instead of how I actually feel. Because it would be weird to have a giant discrepancy, no?

Also, the goals we set at the beginning of the year (theoretically, but actually sometime near the beginning of the second quarter) always get updated right before the review process starts to match what we actually did during the year. So really the whole thing is a sham.

And stupid.

And an utter waste of my time.

Because when I waste time at work, I want it to be on my terms!

Under the hood

I’ve spent a few minutes this morning mucking with the PHP behind this blog for the first time in forever. Notes:

  1. I still hate PHP. It so easily facilitates mixing code and output that even if you’re doing your best to avoid that kind of crappy behavior, you can’t help but do it.
  2. Not fighting the flow allows for many more fun things to be added to one’s blog.
  3. Albeit, there is much less control over the markup, and thus the presentation.
  4. PHP still sucks.
  5. I hate PHP

On the other hand, this should enable better integration between blog / Facebook / Twitter…and some day Google+ if only Google would open their API to read/write instead of read-only. It’s surprising behavior from them.

So, enjoy the “better” search, the Twitter feed, and better organized archives.

Personal growth

Oh hooray! It’s annual review time! The time of year where we have to scramble to find a few uninterrupted hours in our busy days to fill out online forms telling folks how we think we did in the past year. How well we’ve fulfilled arbitrary goals measured with arbitrary metrics that, while relevant twelve months ago, correspond with the actual tasks assigned through the last year about as well as any astrological projection might.

One might come away with the impression that I am not an enthusiastic participant in this time suck masquerading as a guide to personal and professional growth. That would be a superficial understanding of the depth of feeling I have toward this activity. As a true team player, I am fully cognizant of the value this provides to the HR department. Generating fodder for various charts and graphs and glossy documents is a vital contribution I can make toward their livelihood. I always anticipate the needs of those around me and prioritize accordingly.

Especially gratifying are the spaces for comments on goals dealing with metrics that are to be provided to me by others. More so than that are those cases when my own self evaluation is flagged as late due to my priorities being driven not by HR or myself, but by my direct supervisor who at one point stated “don’t worry about being late, we have other priorities” and then followed that up with “we really need to get those evaluations in” the next day. Oddly, this coincides with a nastygram we received from HR.

So it is with modest pride that I present this request for metrics for a goal common to everyone in the organization which I am a member of, an organization that ostensibly has a very high completion rate given the tenor of the nastygram, yet cannot find any record of. The upshot being, I am under the impression that a large number of self evaluations were completed with a complete disregard for incident rates over the last year’s releases, and time to resolution for each of this issues. As an insightful, vigilant team player with an eye to continual, iterative optimization, I would like to point out that the review process might actually be completely fabricated by a large number of participants. As a team player who not only points out potential pitfalls but also proposes solutions, I suggest that perhaps we stop subscribing to this nifty personal development web service and just have managers provide continual feedback to their reports as to their job performance. This serves the dual objectives of cost cutting and empowering local decision makers.

I look forward to having the opportunity to make continued contributions in the coming year and striving to make $EMPLOYER the best organization in the known universe.