I wonder if these roles tend to attract people who get the most job enjoyment and satisfaction out of the (manual) investigation aspect; it might explain some of the reluctance to adopting or creating more sophisticated observability tooling.
also called by some other names, including NIH syndrome, protecting your turf, we do it this way around here, our culture, etc.
In my -very- humble opinion, you should wait at least a year before making big swinging changes or recommendations, most importantly in any big company.
After that honeymoon period, all but the most autistic people will learn the organisational politics, keep their head down, and “play the game” to be assigned trivial menial tasks in some unimportant corner of the system. At that point, only after two beers will they give their closest colleagues their true opinion.
I’ve seen this play out over and over, organisation after organisation.
The corollary is that you yourself are not immune to this effect and will grow accustomed to almost any amount of insanity. You too will find yourself saying sentences like “oh, it always has been like this” and “don’t try to change that” or “that’s the responsibility of another team” even though you know full well they’re barely even aware of what that thing is, let alone maintaining it in a responsible fashion.
PS: This is my purpose in a nutshell as a consultant. I turn up and provide my unvarnished opinion, without being even aware of what I’m “not supposed to say” because “it upsets that psychotic manager”. I’ll be gone before I have any personal political consequences, but the report document will remain, pointing the finger at people that would normally try to bite it off.
I also see a single-mindedness to specific technical implementations where a more mature view would be to see tech as a business and us less as artisans than blue collar workers.
> steve jobs on "You're right, but it doesn't matter" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o
FWIW, academia has off-the-charts levels of "wtf" that newcomers will point out, though it's even more ossified than corporate culture, and they don't hire consultants to come in and fix things :)
That's weird. I love debugging, and so I'm always trying to learn new ways to do it better. I mean, how can it be any other way? How can someone love something and be that committed to sucking at it?
One of the engineers just quit on the spot for a better paid position, the other was demoted and is currently under heavy depression last I heard from him.
Unfortunately, some people confuse the two and believe they are paid to do the latter, not the former, simply because others look at those steps and go “wtf, we could make that hell more pleasant and easier to deal with”.
In the same vein, “creating perceived job security for yourself by willing to continuously deal with stupid bs that others rightfully aren’t interested in wasting time on.”
Sadly, you are ultimately right though, as misguided self-interest often tends to win over well-meant proposals.
