We’ve had an on-call ticket sitting for over 3 weeks now and I’m on-call this week so I can finally getting to it because our triage bucket is pretty empty. After digging into it a bit I discovered the feature is actually working exactly as we intended it to be, but it’s not showing all the information we actually want it to.

Totally fine! I’ll work with Product to determine if this is how they meant for it to work, and if it’s not we can have it changed to be something more descriptive. So after a short meeting we decided late yesterday afternoon that we wanted it changed to be more descriptive. Again, totally fine!

This morning I got the pull request out after an hour or two of work and testing. It’s been sitting waiting for review for about 30 minutes. Our product manager DM’s me on Slack asking if I can have the feature out before a 10am meeting with a large client.

My response was basically like “hopefully! Just waiting on a review”.

Their response was “ok, please ping the channel if you think people need encouragement given the timeline”.

The “timeline” is bullshit. Yes I understand you want it ASAP, but it’s been in the backlog for 3 weeks and now I’m expected to get it shipped and in production within 2 hours of coming up with the solution?

I reluctantly pinged our engineering channel to give people a nudge just to cover my ass. No one responded! It’s before 10am on a Friday and most of our development team are not morning people so of course it didn’t get reviewed.

We are also in the middle of a huge feature release on a very short deadline (what’s new?!) so I suspect most people are heads down working through that.

Stop rushing. Stop rushing and making it seem like everything is a fire. If you make everything seem like a huge deal then nothing is because we become so jaded to always being in a rush. This little “bug” fix does not matter and does not need to be rushed out while taking several engineers out of their flow state working on a feature that does matter.

I think this is a problem with the mind and I experience it constantly. I’ll probably write more about it soon, but an example of it is relating to this god forsaken garage build I’m doing.

My contractor said he would be able to add running water to the build for little cost. I hadn’t even considered that but once it was brought up and committed to I can’t imagine the garage without it! Now of course my contractor is complaining that it’s harder than he initially thought and wants to cut it out or charge me significantly more.

I would have been totally fine if it wasn’t brought up in the first place as it never even crossed my mind! But since it was injected into my brain and I’ve dreamt of all the problems it will solve it’s become non-negotiable. Rewind several months and it’s not even a thought.

It’s crazy how these little things can infiltrate your mind and become a priority when there is no reason for them to be.