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Erlang Salesforce.com Grafana Kibana
In autumn 2023 the budget of Expericom was severely decreased and I had to return to the mobility organization. I ended up in one of small teams that were developing small features in AMF. (Previously, I mentioned SGSN-MME. But MME was in LTE, in 5G it is AMF instead. If you no longer understand what I mean, never mind. Yet another packet core function.) Before I was working with a broad range of products and dozens of people from different parts of the company. Dynamic, fun, social, sometimes challenging and stressful. And suddenly I returned to doing small changes in a small product. In yet another team that was not interested in doing anything else. Just slowly following the process. Most of them also prefered working from home. I felt somewhere in between a retirement home and a cemetery. Strange and unpleasant feeling. Learning Erlang would not help, it was a feeling of purpose that was missing. It took five months before the managers finally started to listen. At last, they approved another job rotation for me – this time to global support. Not too bad.
In some other departments one can spend months without having any idea about what is going on. But not in global support. Ericsson has many customers around the world – a lot of networks with different versions of equipment. Problems happen in networks every day, the most straightforward issues were usually resolved by junior technicians. But when more complex issues were found, they were documented in the Salesforce.com application and then followed up by engineers in global support. Some issues just needed slightly deeper investigation, other were emergencies that required stressful calls with other experts, support managers and angry customers. Sometimes issues were complemented with metrics. And lots of logs! Fortunately, we could use a few really good tools – Grafana and Kibana were a just a couple of them. A few internal tools were also very helpful when doing the root-cause analysis (RCA). One can compare the whole our team in global support with firefighters – and it was burning a lot! Of course, it inevitably affected the people – everyone was forced to grasp the difference between critically important things and less significant ones. I would call my working there as the best master class in both time- and stress management. And the team there was among the best teams I ever met at Ericsson – extremely helpful, exceptionally supportive and purely pragmatic.
However, it was quite obvious that I was not there from the beginning – my way of working was very different. The standard approach was looking for similar issues in the knowledge database, which was indeed reasonable for most of cases. However, when similar issues were not yet found or documented, something else was needed. But since I was working in the development before, for me it was much easier. Some features were previously developed by my team – I knew what the problem was, other features were developed by other teams in the same building – I knew whom to ask. When several products were involved, I could always go upstairs and talk to a few system managers. While others had to write trouble reports and wait for days before getting replies, I could talk to experienced engineers and only then write trouble reports (as a simple formality). But I needed to be careful since many experienced engineers liked talking a lot. I was ready to listen, which often led to hours of chatting instead of just answering a quick question. So, I became a distracting factor. But the customers (and managers in support) were happy. Usually people start being productive there after 3-4 months, I started resolving cases at the end of my first week.
Were there any disadvantages? The noise! Imagine working at a call center in some open plan office. Now add that half of your colleagues have hard to hear – they try to talk a bit louder. And they are talking simultaneously – in different languages. And you are sitting less that two meters from some of them. Now you know exactly what I mean. Good luck in trying to concentrate! Fortunately, I had access to a few silent rooms. Unfortunately, those silent rooms on the same floor were often occupied. If I needed silence, I had to take longer walks to the ground floor instead. Perhaps, I am one of those 15–20% of the population who have higher sensory processing sensitivity. There was yet another disadvantage – my feeling of being in a hamster wheel. I saw the need in my work at global support. (Resolving some difficult issue and then hearing a few kind words from experienced colleagues usually helps.) Nevertheless, I was only seeing a never ending flow of issues, without any long-term goal. Sure, I could always run faster, just like that hamster in his wheel. But I was not moving any forward.