Wage Slave

 

Yesterday was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back, and made me even more determined to find another job. Over the past few years my mental health has been slowly eroded by a seemingly endless and thankless cycle of non-achievement in my current role, where my normal default of having a high work ethic and buckets of enthusiasm for educational IT has been replaced by a cold hard cynicism for anything and anyone above the "coal face" tier at work. Those of us who actually do the real work to keep the place from descending into chaos (because it always feels like Mr Incredible's speech - where he talks about having to save the world over and over again but just fucking ONCE it would be nice if it would stay saved!)

This year has been awful. We've had three projects where technical teams (and myself) have been involved and plain outright ignored. Every time we raise very valid points about data security or governance, or the sheer workload involved in supporting someone's new 'candy like button that they want to press' we're shouted down, called negative, grumpy, not team players. The thing is there's a pair of blinkers for every fuckwit in project or middle management where they just cannot see these things, or more likely won't look just a little to the left or right to see them. 

But yesterday tipped me over the edge. A long vaunted clusterfuck / dumpster fire re-emerged from someone who definitely knows better, but has used their new elevated privilege to open their bowels on our team from on high, bringing this particular nonsense back from the dead. A nonsense that - like many of the nonsenses in educational IT - has little or no business worth but is seen as the magical answer to non-existent problems. We now have two teams, a bunch of technical folk who are keeping the plates spinning, and a new Digital Governance Unit that seems to spend all its time like kids in a candy store, cherry picking the next compliance breach in sheep's clothing to pin their shiny little glory barges to. 

We've had lots of workplace initiatives that talk about 'wellness' and 'workplace health' that are very little more than just box-ticking exercises by our middle and senior management teams, designed to reassure the CIOs and department heads that they're doing everything they possibly can to stop their workforce from going absolutely batshit crazy, or off sick with long term stress (which is the situation I am very closely looking into currently). 

I've never backed down from any kind of a fight, and I detest bullies - and that's what these people are, nothing but talentless bullies who exercise their crappy little bits of authority to make people's lives miserable, or to pass on the wishes of the over-privileged users who seem to think that governance and security should be at the bottom of any pile when a project is given consideration. Nope, now we're also dealing with a new agile methodology which passes up projects in favour of "Just getting on and cobbling some shambles together" - the mentality that if you throw enough shit at a wall some of it might actually stick (and this initiative is being led by someone who feels like a shambolic caricature of a character from "The League of Gentlemen" which doesn't really help my mental state. 

So after ten years I'm back to scanning job sites and looking for things to apply for, which at my age isn't a situation I relish. Ironically when I first got here I used to love this job, loved the challenge of it, and actually had some good folk in the team who watched each other's backs. Now everyone just watches their own, and they need to because it's hell.