At my job, we have 6 application development teams (previously 7, but we’re about to consolidate one team across the others). We also have one primary product that we built entirely in house and from scratch, but it was rushed and built as quickly as possible. In the world of software development, tight deadlines means buggier code, and buggy code means less stability for the product. With 7 teams all working on the same product at the same time in a very tight timeframe, there were A LOT of bugs introduced into the code.
Once we released our primary product, the amount of problems became so overwhelming that most teams had the amount of work they could normally accomplish drop significantly. The leadership in our department decided to do something about it, and thus our support process was born. Every 2 weeks, one team would shoulder the responsibility of being on support for two weeks. That means every 14 weeks, my team would be on support – except we were on it more than most. Our team was “volunteered” to pioneer this into the new year as we aligned the teams’ schedules so this new plan would work. We were on support for seven weeks to begin with, and it was awful.
You see, the idea for this support period was that since my area was the third tier of support, most support requests would be resolved before they got to us, so we would have time for personal development (studying technology, honing your skills, taking trainings, etc.), going back and resolving things we had not implemented well in the past, and just kind of taking it easy. This could not have been farther from the truth. In reality, we were attempting to resolve anywhere between 15-30 support tickets each day. The mental effort and exhaustive switching costs of going back and forth between one thing and the next every 15 minutes is one of the most tiresome things I have ever done. Investigating pieces of a system you know nothing about, dealing with “URGENT NEED THIS DONE NOW” requests when in reality it isn’t anywhere close to urgent, sending requests back to lower tiers for things that they should have resolved themselves – all of this made for one very unhappy me.
My team has been on support again for the past two weeks, which means I haven’t had time to sit and do what I would like to do. That includes creating entries in this journal. Today is our last day of support and I got into work early so I could sit and have a bit of time to relax and plan my day, but also to make sure I had time to create an entry or two for this. I’ve missed the ability to sit and think critically about some prompt about my life or similar. I apologize for the lack of content, but hopefully it picks up again soon since support is almost over.