Is the boss out today?

In the times BP (Before the Pandemic), an affirmative answer to this questions used to be the source of solace and the expectation of (finally!) a productive day. Every time the boss was away, the rest of the team had a chance to work without the burden of unjustified meetings of inexplicable length, repeated calls or a seemingly endless flow of email. Of course, the disturbances did not come only from the boss himself, but his pressure on other team mates also resulted in them writing, calling or paying you a visit. That was normal office life and the days the boss was out everybody hurried to try to finish this long-standing task that they did not manage to attend to because it requires a minimum amount of undisturbed work to make meaningful progress.

Photo: Black Stripe at English Wikipedia / CC BY-SA

The problem in AP times is exactly the opposite. With bosses absent or focus in their own line of work the rest of the team has stopped feeling the pressure to be responsive and meet the deadlines, if ever deadlines are set. Emails go without a response for days, deliveries happen without proper checks (if at all) and the weekly list of team achievements grows leaner and leaner. Yesterday I sent out a request for support to someone in the team, and he answered that he was not in the office and to wait until today. Now, today is come and gone and I never heard back from him. Is the job done? I will have to check on Monday. In the meantime, I did manage to make headway in a long-standing software problem that I never had the time to investigate before. It will take me a couple of days to finish it out, so I will not run out of work for now, but it is not a situation that I like.

In the afternoon I drove Jason for a sleep-over in at a friend's house, who lives in a small village in the countryside surrounded by rivers and mountains. I hope he enjoys the stay as much as I enjoyed the drive (and I get to pick him tomorrow too!).

I have also spent almost three hours solving this week's programming assignment for my online course. It is surprising how difficult tasks can be daunting and rewarding at the same time. The exercise comes with self-checks, which is a very good way to get immediate feedback on how you are doing with the work, but it can be challenging to find out what is going wrong if you only have the final result to check. Fortunately I did not have to dig very deep before I found a way to make the program work and provide the expected results, but it is good that the assignment comes with a second, simple test set, which can be used for deep debugging if needed.

All in all, it has not been a bad week, let us see how things continue on Monday. Enjoy your weekend!