My director sent an email blast this morning, thanking us all for a successful cutover last night.


Long story short, the first and probably most difficult phase of the "Single Sign On Replacement" project is over. My piece is in production. Every single user who logs into anything at my company uses this software.


The software itself seems simple. To a user, it just looks like a login page.


But the real magic of this application is that it's always up.


A server can catch on fire and go down. Doesn't matter. Stays up. Hackers can perform denial of service attacks or all sorts of signature-based probing. They will fail. The app remains up. It processes about 5,000 log-in attempts per minute, per node, and there are four nodes. 5 x 4 = 20,000 per minute capacity. The highest number of log-in attempts we've ever had in a five minute span is about 3,000. So the system is incredibly oversized, and we could consider dropping a node at some point. But for now, it's fine.


It stays up if the database where user sessions are stored goes down, and it stays up when our directory server – a separate system containing details like user phone numbers and addresses and various other important associated profile information – is down. It prints appropriate messages to users when things go wrong so they know what to do. And the whole thing is containerized and cloned out to the nodes, so they're always guaranteed in sync.


It is also free because it's open source.


I'm proud of the work but it's been the worst year of my career. The job needs to slow down. I've been attempting to position myself to be able to work on other hobbies and personal goals when things "finally slow down" and now that the cutover is done, it had better slow down. If "it" doesn't slow down, meaning, the job does not organically start asking less of me, then "I" will slow down, meaning: I am going to quiet quit.


Quiet quitting is a stupid phrase because it should not have the word "quit" in it. I am not going to quit, or stop caring about work. Quiet quitting is, according to standard internet definitions, about working your hours, no more, no less. Quiet quitting is about doing your job and not volunteering to do any more work than your manager asks you to do.


I'm fifty years old. My generation – I'm midway between Xers and Millennials – had a different phrase to illustrate a similar concept. We called it mailing it in. This is a better image to describe what I'm going to do. I am not quitting and I'm not doing anything quietly. I'm simply not going to go above and beyond any longer.
I've done enough "above and beyonding" for the rest of my career.


So my director, Nigel Frontier, sends an email this morning thanking the whole team.


I'm immediately irritated because although yes, everyone deserves thanks, I carried half of this project. Half. On a team of eight.


I know my own manager, Suresh Puri, doesn't speak to Nigel often – and rarely discusses the well being of his employees. Suresh refers to us as "resources" rather than people. I must force Suresh to acknowledge that I am a person, with emotions and limits and drives and weaknesses and everything else, as his preference is to treat me like I am just another machine in a server room.


Considering I've been thinking about quitting this year – more than qutting actually, more like punching my co-worker Alpo in the face repeatedly before setting the building on fire like Milton in Office Space – I finally decided that it was time to let Nigel know that the year was difficult. I drafted an email and sent it before I could think about it too hard.




Nigel - thanks for the recognition.


Since we don't talk often, I want to share something plainly rather than let it go unsaid: I carried half of this project (BCIDP) end to end for the better part of a year, and it came at a real personal cost, which might not be apparent from where you sit.  I'm not raising this as a complaint, just so you have the fuller picture of what the year took.  What we achieved as a team was exceptional, but often exceptional accomplishments come with a hidden and genuine cost to one's personal life.  


That being said, I'm genuinely glad it's done and even more glad we got it right.  This move places us in a commanding position to move forward with other IAM revamp goals.

Happy to talk more if you are ever interested.


Tobias

This may end up being a mistake. Or it may be fine. My best guess is that Nigel will ignore it and not respond to me directly.


While I was typing this entry, Alpo sends a response. This obligates me to send my own response because if I do not respond to this circle-jerk of a thread now, it looks like I am disengaged, or worse, that Alpo is taking credit for my work, or trying to one-up me. I am at least his peer – I carried half of this fucking project and also did a shit-ton of work for him directly. He's a competent worker but I also despise his nature – OCD, toxic workaholic, commanding. I broke a phone in Februrary after a tough day with him – just completely melted down in my kitchen, with Penny in the other room –


I am not someone who melts down easily but there's something about his nature that makes me feel too many things simultaneously – angry, insecure, overworked, abused, controlled.


When he starts talking to me in a certain manner – the manner of command, like: do this, do that – I have to do everything I can to stay focused instead of losing myself in the negative emotions that he stirs in me.

So here is the fake assed email I wrote.


Hi everyone,
I'll keep this short, since I can't quite bring myself to restate what others have already said so well. But I couldn't let this thread pass without thanking everyone from my heart.
It's a cliché because it's true: nobody writes software or delivers infrastructure of this nature alone. Good teams figure out how to work together and build something that works. Great teams build something that stays up, stays secure, and handles whatever gets thrown at it.  
With BCAG and BCIDP, I think we delivered something truly great.
Thank you all.
Joe

Nigel just got back to me. We'll meet on Friday.


I'll need to be careful to not let my grievances turn into unhinged whining. I probably shouldn't just unleash about how distasteful I found Alpo to be – maybe keep the fantasies of punching him in the face to myself. I'll keep it simple and instead just state that it's been the most demanding year of my professional life and I can't work at this pace any longer, that my health and personal relationships have suffered, and that at times I did not feel supported by management or team.
Internally I know how lonely the work was. I rebuilt enterprise grade software and added continuous deployment and automation to it.


One of my recurring thoughts was: It's hard and scary to build something new. It's even harder and scarier when you know that everyone in your org is going to use it on day one and that there is zero tolerance for issues of any sort. At times I went hours straight working while feeling that I almost coudn't breathe - the fear can really knock the wind out of you, make it hard to sleep, reduce emotional control. It's very hard to articulate – which is surprising given just how many weeks and months I spent in this state.


Steinbeck sometimes said that he wouldn't write about an experience too soon after having it. Paraphrased: I can't write hot. It's no good that way. Things have to cool off – you need to get some distance from the thing it is you're writing about, or it'll come out wrong.


Of course this is directly at odds with Hemingway, who insisted you must write immediately about the things that hurt the most. Once you find the subject that you're most uncomfortable about, he wrote, the most painful thing, the most difficult experience, the person that hurt you the most or the demands that were impossible for you to meet – that's it. That's what you need to write about. That's the thing that's alive in your heart and needs to be translated to the page.


With all this contradictory advice, it's a good thing I'm not a real writer and don't have to decide what I really believe. I write code, where the effectiveness of what is generated determines whether it is any good. Code doesn't have REACT VIDEOS critiquing it. It is not meant to stir emotions.


It is just meant to work.