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RTOS Yocto Project Linux CVE B driving licence
Have you ever seen Groundhog Day? If yes, you could guess how I was feeling in summer 2019. Otherwise, I would highly recommend watching that film. Wikipedia states that it "is considered one of the greatest films ever made". Who am I to argue? Anyway, I decided to try something different and join another organization in August 2019. If you have become curious about the product, you could read about SGSN-MME. However, the focus was not the product itself but rather the platform for the product. From the beginning I heard that it would have to do with RTOS. But the actual focus turned out to be on Yocto Project. Feeling confused? Need a simple explanation? Okay, I can try a different approach. Can you imagine a building? (I really hope so. I will not be able to explain otherwise.) Imagine that its foundation needs to be completely replaced by another one. But the construction, heating system, plumbing, ventilation and the visual appearance need to stay intact. Also add that a few drawings are either incorrect or missing. Now you might imagine the situation that I was in – but in the software world. Older Linux distributions needed to be replaced with newer versions and the layer in between had to undergo the necessary updates. But the application itself had to remain intact. What was the point of doing all this? Newer distributions (usually) mean higher security. When a distribution becomes older, more and more vulnerabilities are being found and become known, which eventually makes the whole system less secure. For the most curious minds I can even recommend reading about CVE. However, application developers were seeing fully functional old platforms and things that became broken during upgrades to new platforms. In other words, our successful work was almost invisible while every issue became an immediate source of complaints. I got to learn how it was to do the work with the invisible gratitude. And that was only the technical part of the challenge. The social part turned out to be much worse.
I will not go into technical details due to non-disclosure agreement. However, when something was already disclosed a few months before my joining the department, blaming it on me could no longer have any legal or logical grounds. Since the Internet remembers everything, just asking your favourite search engine is enough. For example, opening a few links on the first page of search results for "December 6, 2018 outage" might give you a general idea. I guess, when this happen in organizations, one could expect some blame game. As a result, when I joined the department in August 2019, I found a group of people who were scared of making any independent decision. Even though I could see them having daily scrums, sprint planning, reviews and retrospectives, no one could say anything about the progress. Neither engineers, nor managers. Not even the product owner. At first I even thought that no one cared. Later I found out that no one dared. Perhaps, the administrative overreaction simply went too far. To me the entire situation looked like an example of learned helplessness.
Since I joined later, I could afford to be more naive and to take initiative. Being a scrum master I could adjust the scrum events. But something more drastic was still needed. Then I looked into the backlog and tried to remove some old and irrelevant stuff. To my surprise, only about 20-25% of tasks were actually needed! Then I started grouping and structuring the tasks – the team started to show some enthusiasm. Then we tried to estimate – the product owner said: "Please do not stop!" After several such sessions it became clear that the work would not take just 2-3 months but would likely require 1.5 years. After finishing the whole work everyone could see that it actually took 2.5 years. Were my actions according to scrum by the book? Absolutely not. Was it agile? Not sure. But it made the scale of the whole work visible. The progress became visible too. Even though the initial estimate was wrong by a year. But before it was even worse – no one had any idea.
Since I also was the design architect, part of my time was dedicated to reviewing design proposals from other teams. And a lot of meetings with other design architects. Since it all was happening during the COVID-19 pandemic, I had too much online meetings. Way too much. At some point I even started worrying about my sanity and started to look for something physical (and social) to balance my online presence. Perhaps, I am not that introverted as a person. I decided to obtain B driving licence and started looking around. I was hoping to find a few local driving schools. Unfortunately, COVID-19 pandemic made preparing for a driving test way too popular and many driving schools were overbooked. It took me quite some time (and money) before I finally passed the driving part, theory was a piece of cake. However, my biggest mistake was the wrong choice of driving school. Instead of simply looking at the majority of positive reviews I really should have paid attention to a few negative ones. Too slow progress in the beginning was just a tiny part of the problem, later it became much worse. The teacher could not be bothered to try to understand what was going on but instead simply repeated the same thing again and again. There is a quote: "Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results". At some point I decided to try taking some lessons at another school – I should have done it from the very beginning! Clear instructions, interesting challenges, wise thoughts and additional exercises in all aspects where I was feeling the most unsure. Despite already having my driving licence, I am still taking some lessons there from time to time just to hear a few wise thoughts and jokes. If someone is thinking about preparing for a driving test and looking for a great driving school with a knowledgeable teacher (over 70) there is one that I can highly recommend. And if you tend to be thinking too much about all the possible risks (just like me), there is one school that might be best to avoid. Despite being the dynasty of driving teachers, in my case (and also a few others) they made more damage than good. There is one famous quote: "Nature takes a rest on the children of geniuses". Perhaps, their parents and grandparents were pure geniuses in pedagogy of driving. But after looking on the current generation it seems like the nature went pensioned off.
In 2022 it was announced that the platform was going to be outsourced to one of the suppliers. Perhaps, this decision should have been expected since the main focus of the whole packet core product line already became cloud native several years before. Older versions of the platform that were built on both bespoke hardware and virtual machines were approaching their end-of-support and then end-of-life. It was time to start looking for something else.
Nevertheless, my time in the platform team was one of the greatest sources of my learning about the leadership. I would even say that it turned out to be an eye-opening experience for me. I could clearly see what might happen with people who have previously experienced too much pressure from the management – they became broken. Motivation and initiative were completely dead. However, if there is someone (usually an outsider) who has a clear plan and energy, the situation still can be saved. I was fortunate to become that "someone". I also learned to make radical changes when the old approach no longer leaded to results.