The past few weeks have been a literal whirlwind of shifting priorities. I’ve titled this post “Super Transformations” because the pace of change in my project assignments has been dizzyingly fast—almost like the political theatrics we see in election cycles where headlines change every hour to keep the public “entertained.”
To get to the point: I’m not sure if my manager is testing my limits or if we just lack a cohesive roadmap. My recent weeks have looked like this:
- Week 1: “Fran, let’s divide and conquer. You write the streaming server, I’ll write the client.”
- Week 2: “Wait, for the streaming server, let’s just ask Vendor S for a quote. In the meantime, try out VLC, MPlayer, and the internal CMS for the client side.”
- Week 3: “The client-side CMS modifications are looking good, let’s just stick with that.”
Three weeks flew by, and I felt I had achieved absolutely nothing. It felt like I was being forced to “multitask” my entire life. Just when I thought things had settled, a new mission arrived: helping with VHDL development for a hardware board. But the board had issues on Monday, so I was pivoted back to the CMS.
I feel completely lost. Managers often don’t realize that constantly “interrupting” a developer is like interrupting a system process—if the context switch isn’t handled perfectly, the whole thing crashes. I feel like I’m hovering right on the edge of a system-wide “Kernel Panic.”
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