10 March 2021

Love letter


*Sigh*... The eternal struggle between those who primarily talk as their job, and those who actually do the work that produces results.

Well, maybe just a single-sided struggle, since those who just talk has nothing to lose.

Talkers often have very unrealistic notion of the time and effort needed for doers to perform and complete their task, and being talkers, they tend to schedule endless meetings to satisfy their own sense of working and contributing.

Those meetings more often than not are just a waste of time, time that could have been more productive to the doers actually doing their work.

Coincidentally I am currently reading Hack Attack by Nick Davies, and here's a quote from the book that I can completely relate to: "At best, news managers are desperate for copy, so they won't give reporters the time they need to work on stories; at worst, they are little people with big titles who think they should prove themselves by interfering all day long."

So couple the unrealistic deadline with the back to back meetings in normal working hours, I am only left with working overtime to get things done. Over and over again.

The constantly changing project direction does not help, so I am perpetually stuck in a working overtime loop. Unhealthy, demotivating, frustrating.

So when I finally couldn't continue no more yesterday night, well, in the early hours of today since it's past midnight, instead of shutting down and going straight to bed, I took time to compose and then sent a "love" letter to the program lead and various managers.

Giving them a piece of my mind in a politically correct manner. At least I think I wrote it politically correct... *shrug*

And I stated squarely that I will not be meeting the unrealistic deadline, and asked them to better understand the time and effort needed for thermal simulation. I also told them my time and effort would have been used more beneficially if the project direction does not keep changing, that the modelling effort could be used to fine-tune, to perform sensitivity studies, to optimise the system.

Doubt anything will change, but I hope they feel my "love".



Other |wretched workaholic| category entries.


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