fun

last couple of days at work were spent trying to get the other teams work checked as well as trying do the work our team has been assigned and has to get delivered. its all just chaos. we must have half a dozen 100grand a year project managers but god only knows what they are doing. coupled with the fact there is a team of 3 well paid systems admins that appear to not only know little about computers but can not read a server application install sheet, and its a recipe for chaos. i feel sorry for the senior guy in our team of 3 systems admins because he has just had a tsunami of work dumped on him, from the other work stream.

in a chat with the senior guy in our team, he asked me how the next set of trading application servers were looking, that had been recently built by the other team and had been handed over to the application team. he had been told they had been double checked and it was looking good. unfortunately i had to temper his optimism by saying i had taken a quick look over them and he should expect them to be sent back due to incomplete/incorrect config, and with perfect timing, a few hours later, the app owner sent an email listing what was wrong with all but 4 out of 12 servers built for him.

every time i walk past the team of 3 systems admins that are on this part of the project they are always huddled in a meeting room or the dining area having a meeting. i hardly ever see them at their desks. stop talking about shit and start doing shit. there are a couple of guys in that team in particular who are chancers. one of the guys in my team was telling me that one of the other guys had been contracting at merryl lynch and barclays capital and jp morgan before. jesus, they must set the bar really low at those places, because he is absolutely useless. i know a guy at merryl and he is very good indeed. god knows how this chancer got in. genuinely useless. if he did not come to work ever again, i guarantee it would not place any extra burden on the rest of the team to make up for the work he would have done, because he does very little and even then, its wrong.

from my own experience there are ways for chancers and inept people to hide in large investment banks where the teams are big and where the complicated processes are a ready made excuse for not doing something you have been tasked with. in a smaller environment like a hedge fund which does not have 5,000 people in london and you are not working in a team of 30, its easy to get exposed and these guys are. 1 of them has been there over a year, but he was working with the guys that i work with now and they must have been papering over the cracks in work, because he is in a team of inept people and he is not distinguishing himself in a team where the bar has been set very low already by the other 2 people.

i suspect the remainder of my contract from now till december is going to be spent rushing to hit deadlines that have already passed for getting the stuff ready from the other team, whilst trying to fit in the work i am supposed to be doing. the 3 of us in our team could have delivered all the work for both teams, had we had been given everything in the right order and in time. as it stands deadlines have already been missed for lots of application servers built by the other guys and we are trying to just get stuff delivered that should have been done weeks ago. it was a manageable piece of work for 3 competent people to deliver in 6 months. unfortunately we only have 4. still, i guess its just no fun when there is no pressure.

today i have mostly been listening to sharam - fun. the video is shot in san francisco and is based on the car chase scene in the film 'bullit', which features a dodge charger and a ford mustang. coincidentally i had been looking up the prices of renting a new dodge challenger (which is the new equivalent) in LA for a week at the end of the year. its a reasonable price, so am planning on getting one. song is very good as well.