The Holiday Sabotage
Photo by Alex Bertha on Unsplash
There’s a special kind of dread reserved for the first day back after the holidays. You feel like you’ve forgotten how to do your job, your brain has rotted away and simply don’t want to do this anymore.
Yet none of this happens. What does happen is something out of your control which breaks everything.
Welcome to The Holiday Sabotage.
Everything has Changed
While you were off pretending work didn’t exist, something did exist. The corporate wheels still turned, automation still automated and policies were enacted.
In our case, somewhere a decision was made. Not loudly, but through a small notification on our developers laptops. MDM will update your machine on the 1st January, and by machines I mean the underlying operating system will be updated whether you like it or not.
That means on the first day ack productivity will be dead on arrival.
The Illusion of Progress
From the outside, this looks like progress. We all get compliant machines and corporate will be happy. Dashboards are green, risks are reduced.
Someone, somewhere, proudly said “this was handled over the holidays so it wouldn’t disrupt anyone”.
Which is impressive, because that’s exactly what it does.
The First-Day Tax
Our office Wi-Fi is impressively slow. That means when the troops of developers arrive in the office they’ll need to download a new operating system right onto their machine. It’s going to be carnage.
Not only that, some of our development tools are incompatible with the latest version of MacOS.
We’re going to be locked out of basic work tools, permissions might well need “re-approval” and productivity will screech to a halt.
None of this is tracked.
None of it is logged as lost productivity, except against individual developers.
None of it belongs to anyone.
It just quietly consumes time and prevents work from being completed.
Why This Always Happens
Apparently holidays are when accountability goes on vacation.
No one is around to feel the impact.
No one has to support the fallout.
No one gets immediate feedback.
By the time people return, the change is already “done”. This means questioning it now sounds like complaining rather than prevention. When you complain in our place you must have a solution, if not things are going to go badly come performance review time.
Fix
The fix isn’t clever. It’s boring.
We shouldn’t be changing critical systems over the holidays. That’s the worst possible time to be doing so. Developer machines should be treated like production environments, and those using them should be involved in changes before they are implemented. This is about optimizing outcomes rather than optimizing for a simple checklist culture.
Don’t worry. None of this will ever happen.
Conclusion
If you’re sitting at your desk, coffee in hand, wondering why the first day back feels harder than it should….welcome to the club.
None of us forgot how to work. None of us forgot how to be productive.
The world was quietly changed while we were gone, and it wasn’t better.
That’s the holiday sabotage.
About The Author
Professional Software Developer “The Secret Developer” can be found on Twitter @TheSDeveloper.
The Secret Developer believes nothing says “Happy New Year” like losing half a day to a problem nobody will ever take responsibility for.