Not really related to MLC, but the skills built therefrom. In September 2024 I was recruited into a different department by co-worker CC. CC and I were leads on similar systems, and had offices next to each other when in those jobs. He was having a hard time with his manager and had moved to this other department maybe a year before I did. The project we we're on has three years (until September 2027) to figure out how to adapt existing hardware into a new system, design and produce new electronic and mechanical hardware to make it work, and show that it worked in an operational environments test. This company and the other companies we partner with have developed a ridiculous amount of paperwork over the past few decades due to market circumstances; now the circumstances have changed, and we have to move fast.
CC recruited a total of about 20 core people for this project. He predicted that everything would go great as long as we stayed under the upper management radar. We did not. We've been going like gangbusters, and middle management started selling this in a way they shouldn't have. Also, a group parallel to ours lost a big project and has been maneuvering to take over our project for the past 9-12 months. (They didn't actually lose theirs, it just moved to a different site; they could have stayed on under the other sites' direction.) As a result, while the top two officials at our primary customer thinks this is exactly what we need to be doing, and we at the line level know we're doing something necessary, people in the middle have no idea what program is what, or where funding is actually going. Our secondary customer started sticking their nose in things, and we're going way to fast for them. (The would be ready about ten years after our goal.)
So, we've been facing loss of funding due to a fixed set of funds being shuffled around, and having to fund the "predatory" department because their big showboat project (grander version of ours) hasn't found its own funding yet. CC is pretty pi$$ed about this; he wrote our project plan, negotiated the deliverables, and has talked to more people in leadership than the number of people I even know. It would be different if they just immediately said they were pulling the plug, since there are lots of other projects to work on. But this has been at least nine months of death by a thousand cuts. At the current rate, we'll run out of our program funding in mid-April, right after we finish our third system-level characterization test. We've already started telling people who are on loan from other departments to take other opportunities if they find one they like.
For me, thanks to my time in LBS land, I'm much more detached from the whole dumpster fire. There are lots of parallels to dealing with MLC:
- All of the outside groups have their own opinions, preconceptions, and motivations
- No matter how good our specific project is or how good we are at it, we can't make anyone outside see that
- At this point, even if we received full restoration of funding tomorrow, our project has been irrevocably changed, and
- By clinging to the project we "fell in love with" as it was 1.5 years ago, we could be missing out on other, even better opportunities (this one is a little different; there are moral and spiritual reasons to stick with someone through bad times, but the work situation is really just a job)
Of course, this is tough for people to take, so I've been feeding it out slowly. Our manager has already found side projects for me, CC, and our other top lead, but people get frustrated by that too. I'm the only one who has been through a divorce (and I'm 10-20 years older than everyone else), which is probably why I have a different take on things. But, as our group's ersatz Morale, Welfare, and Recreation officer, I'm trying to be supportive and slowly give people things to think about.
But I didn't come here to talk about work problems, I came here to talk about AI and music. I designed both of our challenge coins, have come up with alternate logos based on different circumstances, and most recently we were planning to use one of the AI song generators to write our project theme song, in the style of Lynyrd Skynyrd. But when I was reading posts last night, and saw Zartheit's links, something in the deep archives of my mind reminded me that someone
already wrote a song about our project!
(This is definitely a few aisles over from Zartheit's selections in the music store...)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqwMbHAMAX8&list=RDPqwMbHAMAX8&start_radio=1
Everything has a beginning and an end. Life is just a cycle of starts and stops. They're ends we don't desire, but they're inevitable and we have to face them. That's what being human is all about. -Jet Black, Cowboy Bebop
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J to the B part 3