Above the black line
Listening to: Keith Jarret - The Köln Concert (1975)
Today was one of these days I wrote about before, about feeling and being overwhelmed. I woke up uneasy and nervous, already apprehensive about getting the day started. I lay in bed, forcing myself to get up but the phone won out; just one more video, just one more distraction, one more reason to not get up and face the day.
I managed to keep this up for just long enough for C. to go to work, and only when I heard the back door slam did I get up. I didn't really want to talk to anyone this morning. I needed a bit of space to gather myself for the (imaginary) storm.
About a year or so ago, I was working as Head of QA at my current company, with a team of twelve engineers working for me. Built up a whole QA department from scratch, put in place all the processes to get thing going. It's not my first rodeo - I've been in this industry now for more than 20-odd years, from small startups to large world-leading brands. I've worked in the US, Sweden, Singapore, Germany, the Uk, Ireland, and India.
I was fucking good at what I did, if I can be frank.
Then, it was decided by management that the QA department was to be folded into the Development teams, my role was made redundant, and I was offered the management of the Operations team. Offered in the sense of this way or the highway. I'm a fifty-year old Test Manager in a world that doesn't need test managers, let alone old test managers, to the decision was pretty straightforward. So, a completely different team, a completely different way of working with technologies and tools and language that was just alien to me. I was not expected to become an Ops Engineer, but merely to use my experience in QA to guide this team towards more structure and process.
And I love being the manager of this team. Quite frankly, they're great at what they do. They know all the ins-and-outs of the landscape, they know who to talk to when it all hits the fan, and nothing really seems to phase them. To be honest, they don't really need me, and I'm just dead weight when it comes to keeping the Production servers up because I don't really know how they do what it is they do.
But I am still their manager. And certain things are expected of me. And this is where I the trouble starts.
I have, at home in my office, a big wide screen monitor, one of those yokes that has a wee bit of a curve on it. It's massive, and it's great. It allows me to have lots of windows open at the same time. It makes me look important. Well, it would do if anyone ever came to the house to see it, which they don't but that's another story for another day. But on this monitor I have a lot of screens open that shows the application health. It shows a lot of other things besides, but I'm fucked if I know what. All I know is these those things there need to be above the black line; those ones there need to be below the black line; that circle should be green, and as long as there's not too many entries in that text box, we're grand.
So occasionally I look over at these things and wonder what's behind the graphs and lines and numbers. What is this really telling me? Should I be worried at all if things go up and down, or when they start flashing? Most of the time it all stays neatly in their lanes, but sometimes things go a bit wonky and the whole thing starts looking like the control panel in the final moments of Chernobyl. Flashing lights, graphs going this way and that, green turns to orange turns to red. The phone rings, Central IT are on the phone wanting things escalated and so on.
All very stressful.
I never had that in QA. Things don't generally flash red, and when they do it's all cool because we're not on Production and we can fix it. But not in my current role. That shit is flashing red, and somewhere there's a customer not able to buy their grommets, whatchamacallits, and thingamabobs. Revenue declines. 'Fix it!!!1!' they demand.
So, I do what they taught me on day one on the "How To Be A Modern Manager" course. I don't panic. I don't hide in the toilet, or go for lunch until the whole things cools off.
No, I delegate. Make it someone else's problem.
And this is the bit I find hard. In my old role, I was in control, I knew everything. I could fix things, people trusted me to get the job done. Nothing was a problem. But now I feel so helpless, always having to rely on other people to do simple things. I feel I'm a burden to the team, dead-weight, just more noise on the wire. Everything I do requires the team to help me out, to explain things in simple terms as if they're talking to a five year-old. And they're very patient, bless them. They never get annoyed or frustrated. But they must wonder sometimes if they'd not been better off with someone who knew what they were doing, who spoke their language, who understood their pain.
So everyday I wake up the same way. And it's not about not getting things done. Things always get done. It's more about how they get done. Appearing confident and knowledgeable in the morning stand-up; being able to explain in clear and concise terms to my manager why availability went down from 99.9% to 99.8%. Interviewing a candidate for an open position and appearing to know what the hell I'm talking about. It's a lot of stress. The sort that keeps you clicking on one more video in bed, even though it's nearly 9am and I really need to get up.
I always thought I suffered from imposter syndrome. But really I think it's more about identity. I built something, I was good, I knew who I was professionally — and then that was taken away and replaced with something unfamiliar. The phone-scrolling isn't really about laziness, it's about dread. About keeping up appearances.
The worst part isn't the job. It's not knowing who I am in it anymore. That "dead weight" feeling isn't really about Ops — it's about having lost the version of myself that I trusted.
And yet. Nobody has fired me. The servers stay up. The team gets on with it, and I get on with them. Maybe that’s all this is: turning up, not panicking, and staying out of the way when it matters, letting others do the work while I deal with the PR.
Maybe that is the job.
Or maybe I’ve just got very good at pretending.
Either way, it's nearly 9am, and I really need to get going.