'tis the season.... in It's a llittle llazy over here

… to spend half your day doing performance review bullshit that means nothing because it’s 90% about who’s in the room when you’re being moderated, falalalalaaaaalalalala......

Gawd.

And to make personal and business cases for promotions. Yeah.

i don’t see it. But honestly, I’ve largely given up trying to predict these things. I honestly could get promoted out of absolutely nowhere, or I could get a terrible rating or a great rating, or a middling rating. . . . I can’t pitch it. I really don’t know how I’m viewed by the people in our function who will be reviewing promotion cases.

I have a conversation scheduled in with our glorious team leader on Wednesday. I need, basically, to make up a job for myself at the next level and get him to back it (business case) and then evidence how I’m already performing at the next level (personal case).

It’s difficult for me. I don’t lead a team, and I don’t want to lead a team, but managing a team is the golden promotion ticket. To be fair, our leader absolutely does buy into the idea that there should be a place for ‘technical’ people at the next grade - senior developers and the like - and there are people like that in that kind of role, but they all joined at that grade before we were in our current function. The general view is that doers are interchangeable drones.

And this, frankly, is why most of what our team delivers now is utter rubbish. Our IT function is built on an assignment model and people are expected to move around a lot from one assignment to another. The inbuilt assumption is that anyone at a grade can go in and do any job so everyone can just hop around and change role every 12 months. Which is total lunacy. Sure, it works for some parts of an IT function, but not ours. You have to have experience in our tools and systems or things go horribly wrong.

Case in point - I’ve spent the last two weeks averting a major disaster because some idiot decided it’d be a good idea to have our external developers (who understand jack-all about our data) build a business-critical tool speaking directly to our business stakeholders with no analyst in between. The result of that? A tool that didn’t work in any way giving reports that were completely wrong with a security setup that didn’t secure anything from anyone. Thankfully, they invited me to a call with one of the testers and I got sight of it in time to stick my oar in.

But I digress. I shall put together my case and throw it to the mercy of the leadership team. You can but ask.

What’s also particularly annoying is the way that jobs that I should be considering always, always, always, ALWAYS come up just when I have an incentive to wait. One came up the other day. Salary equivalent to the next grade up, location not ideal but not impossible, job description practically begging me to apply. . . .

Still, at least it confirms that I am absolutely right to be thinking that it’s promotion or move. I do not have to stay where I am. I need to remember that. The progression chances are there outside my current firm. Not many, but they are there and I can’t look the other way forever.

Llamas, of course, remain llargely awesome.