Relativity

So, yesterday—well, it started on Friday—one of the products I’m managing kind of blew up. More specifically, we’d changed the access mode from Active Directory to roles-based, and clearly something went wrong.

We’d somehow given everyone not assigned to a specific role (customer support, consulting, systems engineering, etc.) a default role of absolute power: they got super-admin functionality and could do anything they wanted. Friday, Engineering changed the default to what we give sales—which is to say, nearly nothing, because you frankly have to keep your eye on these guys or they’ll give everything away to make a sale.

Well—within a New York instant, Microsoft Teams blew up with people wanting to know why they have access to nearly nothing. Turns out somehow a lot of folks got moved from appropriate entitlements to what we give sales, and I spent a good amount of the day resetting the permissions.

Well, that continued yesterday, and the head of systems engineering was absolutely steamed.

And I happened to be out of the office for a good part of the day, because I had a doctor’s appointment in the District They Call Columbia, which kills half the day, metroing in, appointment and metroing back. So my PM colleague and the director of engineering took a lot of the WTF emails in my stead. I got back in time to sit in on the call with the very steamed SE head (my colleague is a star), and we’re still trying to get people back to work.

While I was in the District, I had a 30-minute catch-up with one of my former colleagues. And let me just say that—no matter how chaotic some of my current work is—I am so, so, so glad that I am no longer in that morass of poor management and organization. It seems that the Clown Car running the program from which I was laid off in June still have not settled on a contractor to build out the complex system they need in order to launch their very worthy initiative. This was supposed to have been accomplished (hiring the consultants) in July. We’re now rounding the corner for December. That means they will have nothing to launch for the foreseeable future.

Gawd.

If I were there I’d still be dealing with master-level ignorance and incompetence. And I’d be dying of frustration. Compared to that a very steamed head of SEs is paradise.