so out of the habit
9 Nov 2013 12:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaigouRealized I've only been posting like what, once every few weeks? It's been... real. Around here. Short version of current lessons (re)learned:
1) You cannot have a successful project without someone to make the decisions, aka 'manager'. Especially in agile. No project manager, you might as well accept the project will most likely fail. Or if it succeeds, it will be through no small amount of teeth-pulling, a lot of arguing, and a whole lot of flailing.
2) If #1 isn't obvious, I'm on a project where the project manager has a) been interim and b) been busy with other things and c) thought the project would be fine without a hands-on manager. Recipe for fail!
3) This is complicated by the realization that I'm working with an ENFP* who is utterly clueless (and mostly uncaring for) deadlines, and too busy chasing the awesome with no care for the fact that he's rewriting everything almost daily, breaking the build, and making it impossible for me to get anything done in my area of the project. Multiply the lack-of-care with an INTP on the other side, who is equally entranced not only by ideas (and equally bad with deadlines), but downright hostile to task management apps like Jira or Rally, yet loves to talk about how we're building an awesome app. This is turning me into an unhappy ENTJ, because someone around here has got to actually build this app. As opposed to just talking about it (the INTP) or re-building the parts already built (the ENFP).
4) What the hell an ENFP is doing as a web dev, i don't even. Really. I'm out of evens.
5) I'm the only contractor. Guess who's going to get blamed when we don't deliver.
6) Yes, I am making plans. They may change, but it's still plans. As long as I'm pretending to be an ENTJ at work, I might as well do good with it.
7) If I did not have a local network of other women devs to keep me balanced, I really don't know where I'd be right now. Probably in a bunch of miserable interviews as a BA or IA again, having fled the madness that has been this year's dev jobs. Having a network of people who know what it's like is all that's kept me sane.
*If you're not familiar with MBTI, look it up; my teammates aren't edge cases. They're pretty much textbook. It's me, as more of an xNTx, who's flexing to make up for the areas they lack. Like, planning, and follow-through, and the all-important communicate-with-others. The last one, times infinity. If I hear one more "oh, I forgot to mention", I'm gonna start throwing things.
WHY AM I THE RESPONSIBLE ONE. How did this I can't even. You know something's gotta be seriously wrong when I'm the one who ends up with the title "responsible one". Ugh.
ETA: on the plus/tangential side, for those of you still paying attention to the wip, I'm starting again. Now that I've done another massive round of research and let it simmer. Believe me, I've had the time -- sometimes hours while waiting for the ENFP to get around to, y'know, undoing/fixing whatever he's broken this time. Yes, hours.
1) You cannot have a successful project without someone to make the decisions, aka 'manager'. Especially in agile. No project manager, you might as well accept the project will most likely fail. Or if it succeeds, it will be through no small amount of teeth-pulling, a lot of arguing, and a whole lot of flailing.
2) If #1 isn't obvious, I'm on a project where the project manager has a) been interim and b) been busy with other things and c) thought the project would be fine without a hands-on manager. Recipe for fail!
3) This is complicated by the realization that I'm working with an ENFP* who is utterly clueless (and mostly uncaring for) deadlines, and too busy chasing the awesome with no care for the fact that he's rewriting everything almost daily, breaking the build, and making it impossible for me to get anything done in my area of the project. Multiply the lack-of-care with an INTP on the other side, who is equally entranced not only by ideas (and equally bad with deadlines), but downright hostile to task management apps like Jira or Rally, yet loves to talk about how we're building an awesome app. This is turning me into an unhappy ENTJ, because someone around here has got to actually build this app. As opposed to just talking about it (the INTP) or re-building the parts already built (the ENFP).
4) What the hell an ENFP is doing as a web dev, i don't even. Really. I'm out of evens.
5) I'm the only contractor. Guess who's going to get blamed when we don't deliver.
6) Yes, I am making plans. They may change, but it's still plans. As long as I'm pretending to be an ENTJ at work, I might as well do good with it.
7) If I did not have a local network of other women devs to keep me balanced, I really don't know where I'd be right now. Probably in a bunch of miserable interviews as a BA or IA again, having fled the madness that has been this year's dev jobs. Having a network of people who know what it's like is all that's kept me sane.
*If you're not familiar with MBTI, look it up; my teammates aren't edge cases. They're pretty much textbook. It's me, as more of an xNTx, who's flexing to make up for the areas they lack. Like, planning, and follow-through, and the all-important communicate-with-others. The last one, times infinity. If I hear one more "oh, I forgot to mention", I'm gonna start throwing things.
WHY AM I THE RESPONSIBLE ONE. How did this I can't even. You know something's gotta be seriously wrong when I'm the one who ends up with the title "responsible one". Ugh.
ETA: on the plus/tangential side, for those of you still paying attention to the wip, I'm starting again. Now that I've done another massive round of research and let it simmer. Believe me, I've had the time -- sometimes hours while waiting for the ENFP to get around to, y'know, undoing/fixing whatever he's broken this time. Yes, hours.
no subject
Date: 10 Nov 2013 02:07 am (UTC)I can make a stab at this one! Which is, the thing that you use the tools for. Worst-case scenario, your ENFP's in webdev because somebody told them to go into IT to make money, and jobs that NFPs are really good at which involve people and language skills, like documentation or end user tech support, are less lucrative. At which point their longevity in the field will probably be determined by how large the external pressures to keep their job are.
If they want to survive, they've got to attach to a much larger, values-based reason for the work, instead of hooking the success exhaust hose back into the motivation air intake. (The longest I spent doing this kind of work it was to make it easier for teachers to work with homeless youth, which made any amount of tedium bearable.) If they can do that, then what kicks in is the *NFP disinterest in details in a good way; they're flexible, openminded, and work on making everything harmonize. What I suspect, though, is that your ENFP is spending too much time thinking about the end user; the lack of personality sync in your team means he's not thinking about what his teammates want and need. (Fs in IT are kind of precious, I think, because there isn't enough emphasis on the end user experience; but if only one fish is swimming upstream, it's not getting anywhere.)