Wobbly One Of Myriads @wobblewuffess@awoo.space

So yesterday I got had a sit down with my soon to be manager and his boss because HR fucked up my transition massively.

At this point I've been on my new team for a week doing training stuff and taking on deployments and stuff but now my pay raise, position title change and reporting structure doesn't become office until June 1st. No back pay.. why? HR forgot about me then the person managing all that for my new org quit.. and two weeks before my transition date a new person was hired who knew nothing about and thus was shocked when hiring manager for my new role was like "So Sam starts in two weeks, are we good with everything for this transfer and role change?"

Background:
In our cloud ops we have two separate organizations that break down into various teams.
Infrastructure Ops which primary deals with physical stuff, our private cloud side and Product Ops which primarily deals with our Public Cloud stuff.

So on May 6th I transferred from Ops-Eng (combination of NOC, traditional datacenter ops/site ops and sys-admin) on the Infra-Ops side to ProductOps (AWS mircoservices architecture team now also soon to be supporting Azure as well..)

The ProductOps manager filed all my transition paperwork with HR back in Feb of this year, a week before my new team leader approached me to gauge my interest in moving teams. (I'd been one of the original founding members of Ops-Eng, Lead Engineer on it for almost two years and plateaued pretty hard in terms of advancement without changing teams but because I worked 2nd shift and most of Infra-Ops was on the east coast while I was on the West Coast it made getting experience with other teams I could potentially move to all but impossible)

Obviously I said yes because moving into an SRE role is pretty much the only path of advancement left unless I wanted to move into a management role. (Honestly, I like getting work done.. not sitting through meetings)

So things become official in the since that my transfer is happening but we don't have a date yet because backfills neat to happen and HR/Finance still have to approve everything and Ops-Eng has to find someone to work 2nd shift etc. This happens at the beginning of April.

Mid-April we have worked out deadlines for everything (so I stop taking on projects, focus on wrapping up everything I'm working on in order for me to start new role on May 6th).

So May 6th roles around. I show up in the office (gasp from local ops guys because I wfh a lot while on Ops-Eng because my entire team was remote. I sit with my new team)

And nothing from HR.

A week passes.. nothing from HR.

Yesterday I went to request some pto to find I can't.. because I have no supervisor to approve it in our tracking system.

so we contact HR and surprise they still haven't finished filing my anything.

Despite pressure from my former boss (who is waiting on a backfill req to be approved for me.. a week after I left his team) and my current team leader and his manager.
..
Finally HR relents and files everything to become official but because Wed is payday.. guess what.. the earliest my promotion etc becomes official is June 1st and no finance will not let them back date it or back pay me.

Bleh... just starting to wrap my head around AWS and get comfortable with admin tasks in it and now it is time to pick up Azure... because M$ is courting out execs.. and one of the dev teams my new team supports got a mandate to refactor and deploy their new service in Azure by the end of July.

Bleh... so far.. there is one thing I like about Azure. Both the training portal and actual portal have DARK MODE. AMAZON PLEASE DO THIS I"M SICK OF WHITE AND ORANGE-YELLOW!

This is missing the part were I got frustrated and tried to explain things like containers, cloudformation, terraform, terragrunt and various other template and management/deployment tools and she concluded they were basically "Spells"

Please note.. it is not like my mom is dumb.. she was very much the opposite of that with a Ph.D in nursing and 40 years of experience during emergency medicine, family practice, pulmonology and pediatric oncology

It is just really hard to explain public cloud stuff to a lay person.. it might as well be fucking magic.

So... I went from a Server Sorcerer, Legacy Service Necromancer and Incident Inquisitor to.. Cloud Conjuration Witch.

My mom asked me to try to explain my new role.. and I struggled because explaining anything with public cloud space and Ops/DevOps to someone that does not have the technical background knowledge is basically impossible.

"So you write code?"
"Not that much.. I work with the people who write it to make sure it produces a stable, reliable, scalable and secure service/product."
"So.. you are QA?"
"No... I don't test their code... I cast spells on the internet to conjure up fake servers and networks for their code to live on that in turn only exist on another company's abstracted computing layer atop their physical hardware."
"So you are an internet witch..?"

- Actual conversation with my mom..

And it is official.. Now to set up eleventy billion AWS accounts... Fucking hell.

Bleh... what unholy hour is this? I think I am going to hate mondays again

Apparently it was so bad at 7:30am I forgot to hit enter.. lol

FREEDOM FROM THE OPS-ENG 2nd shift oncall...

but Monday I have to be up for a 8am meeting as a shiny new SRE :(

Huh... firefox thinks all my addons no longer are signed correctly on both my windows machines... and murdered them all... tried rolling back.. nope.. tried downloading new ones on a fresh install.. nope

waterfox is working okay though... and able to pull and install addons from addons.mozilla.org.. wtf.

OMG fucking gods... these lamb seekh kababs are amazing... with a red-brown hot curry gravy like sauce, carmelized onions and bellpeppers with some grilled lime slices.

Just spicy enough that my nose is a little wet.. and mmm.. great blend of spices, cilantro, ocassion chunk of fennel.. I'd take a photo but I kinda of devoured them..

Excellent job..Naan & Curry (The garlic naan and lamb kadai were also really tasty)

I'm becoming less and less enchanted with Safeway's delivery and pickup serivces.

Last delivery order had some really wierd substitutions.. like LET ME SUB 1.5lbs of meat for the 3.5-4.5lb pack you ordered.. on 3 different items (boneless porkchops, "country style" ribs and porkloin) literally ruining my meal plans for the evening and the next two days...

Today the pick up service mixed up half of my order with a person that drove off with their car half loaded so the dude scrambled to get all her stuff in after flagging her down at a stop sign. Somehow he loaded the dry goods totes with all the snack foods for our household on it. They were so busy I didn't really get a chance to check every thing until I got home and found a lot missing.

At least they are refunding us... but ugh... no tasty snack foods... and I really don't want to go in a safeway on friday afternoon... it is always hellicaously busy.

words and typos... missing words welp.. I'm sure that sorta makes sense.. mostly.

Wee.... this weekend is the last weekend I'll work in theory. Had my final review with my current manager which was pretty much what you would expect since I'm one week from my last day on his team and 11 days from my promotion and transfer to an SRE role being official.

Everyone seems to think I'll be able to handle this new role well... both my current team and my new team. But I'm seriously nervous. I've been coasting in my current position for a while because of burnout thanks to my shitty schedule and shear amount of interrupt drive work that our oncall hotseat generates (Most of my current team works 1-2 of these a week.. and 1 weekend a month until a month ago I worked 4 one week and 6 the following week on a two week rotation).

Now my transfer and promotion has been real... instead of like.. a thing maybe at some nebulous day in the future.

Even got an off the record mention of what was submitted to HR for my pay increase.. was about what I was hoping for.. around 15%. Will put me in the bottom rung for a public cloud SRE in the bay area.. which is okay, since I'm an AWS neophite joining a team of 2 with a combined 19 years of experience doing things in AWS.

Just... so much new stuff and I'm like... super worried about fucking it up... or failing to meet the seemingly huge expectations everyone seems to have... Fucking imposter syndroming hardcore.

Bleh... feeling really alone and out of place today.. like I don't know where I fit in..anywhere.. or if I'm just some artifact of a different time in various social circles.

Welp... old manager can't spare me until the 4th...

So instead I'll just be in the office a lot more and crosstraining during days I'm not on pagerduty..

Ooof... just got out of a meeting with my soon to be manager and new team leader. Transition date went from May 6th.. to Monday in theory.. but that does not jive with conversation I had with my current manager earlier today!

Hngg.. being up at 9am and in the office around 9:30am on Monday is gonna be rough since I'm working 1pm-8pm on Friday..

weeee... 2.5 hours of meetings starting 2 hours before my shit usually starts... great way to start the day..

also... did not sleep much. so much waking up last night.. almost hourly