I've been "promoted" to tech lead for the Site Reliability team, which means my job is supposed to be building automation tools and doing end-to-end system analysis. I've designed and have begun an automated-application-restart tool to wire into our monitoring so we can detect when we need to boop our software and do so without having to engage Operations.

I wanted this position. I was really excited to take this position. I've got really awesome designs and architecture planned.

Instead, I have spent the last four days doing Operations' job for them, because for the last three _weeks_ one of our biggest customers has been in a state of intermittent outage and nobody in Operations has actually been engaged enough to do their role. The customers' stuff is grossly misconfigured, the data we're serving the customer is badly sourced coming in the door, the software is DoSing them with unprocessable requests, and my job has become documenting the maelstrom.

And the most frustrating part of it all is that addressing the root issue will require deep domain knowledge that nobody at the company seems particularly eager to share because everyone says "oh, don't learn how the existing software works; it's being actively deprecated as we speak!" Except that the new systems are already behind schedule and the pain we're experiencing is happening to the customers right now.