Here’s my little cri de couer.

Reviewing a PR by a co-worker for a (Azure) CI/CD pipeline I created. He knows only languages that start with the letter “C” and SQL, so no PowerShell, no bash, no python. He doesn’t understand the pipeline technology and how this particular pipeline works, and he’s following the “spend as little time as possible (preferably none) coming to an understanding, just hack on the code” methodology of software development. He got this work item because I ran out of time in a sprint, like, three sprints ago. His changes won’t work, so I reject the PR. He has an Outlook rule that routes config system (Azure DevOps) emails to a folder he never looks at. Back and forth, back and forth, sprint after sprint, in slow motion. At least it’s leading me to improve documentation, and somebody besides me will understand the system (maybe).

Now I’m looking at his latest PR, composing my proposal on how he should structure the code so it’ll work and realizing he needs a bigger refactor than it looks. And I’m (temporarily) totally defeated.

Let’s look at Mastodon for a bit.

Oh. My entire country is both on fire and sinking fast. It’s getting to the point that work is a break from social media.

Back to work.

Oh, this half-composed PR comment.

Stares off into space.

Maybe LinkedIn? Been a while since I’ve been there, maybe I got a job offer! (Ha.)

Oh, look, a former colleague just started a (richly-deserved) job as a principal member of technical staff at Oracle. Big loss to the old company we both used to work at, but if they wanted to hold on to him….

But the rest… ech, now I need a shower.

Back to work. PR reply finished and sent. On to the next thing (more pipeline work, more corporate nonsense; at least I get to learn about templates and parameters and variables, in their many, many forms).

Sigh. Maybe I’ll dash off a quick blog post and get my complaints off my chest.

Early retirement looks better to me day after day. Unless someone wants to hire a generally intelligent, experienced developer who doesn’t have enough buzzwords in his resume (but is adaptable, a team player (usually), and a value-add).

And, yes, it’s totally unfair that early retirement is an option for me.

Actually, it wouldn’t even be retirement. It would be “scouting out my encore” or “just writing whatever software I want to write.”

It’s not even a CRI de couer, it’s more of a quiet whine de couer.