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#LoveMakeShare 11: Monday again! Do you get to apply your creativity in your day job?
Yes, in the best case: when I have a sensible manager who plays by reasonable rules, and subject matter experts who care to share their time with me, I turn other people's knowledge into works of art. That's why I call myself the Wizard of Docs.
Unfortunately, in my last contract the entire chain of command had AI fever, so I got fired for trying to do my job better than they could handle.
I'm not kidding. They asked me to test a Gemini module. I spotted some logical fallacies in the test methodology, that I could fix if I had access to the edit history of the documentation I was testing on.
On any other team at Google I'd have been able to get that history myself, but this team used version control software that no other team I've worked with has. I couldn't get access to the tutorial because Google's contractor policy gets shittier every contract.
So my manager basically structured the entire team's workflow around not having to teach me to use the software.
Which I did use to my advantage once or twice, to keep them from giving me extra responsibilities.
Anyway, my supervisor on the chatbot project told me several times that she'd get me the old versions of the docs, and then went on vacation without having done so.
I did no testing while she was gone, because I had a good excuse: I was waiting for necessary resources.
She came back, I asked about them again, she said she'd have them by the end of the week.
Before the end of the week, I found out my contract was being terminated early because I pushed back too much and didn't use the AI enough.
Look, if you didn't want to actually try to improve your chatbot, you shouldn't ask me to test it.
Three years ago, my behavior here would have Met Expectations. My commitment to quality wasn't even remarkable, it was default.
I am more googley than the entirety of Google, except perhaps my mentor at Android. Who I would be working for now, if her team had *any* budget for new people. One more thing AI fever has taken from us.
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