Another year, another migration

Because nothing says “progress” like restarting from zero.

“Urgent! PLEASE ATTEND: Next year’s strategy.”

We’re so used to inefficient calls with our manager that he now labels them for us. It’s thoughtful.

So, let’s join.

As usual: big goals, big impact, big dreams. He talks with passion. And he loves seeing smiles on our faces. What he doesn’t know is that if we’re smiling, it’s because we’re commenting live and posting memes in a separate Slack thread.

Then one goal catches my attention: a new migration initiative.

“Why are we moving to this tool? We haven’t even completed the migration to the other one from this year,” I ask.

“We’ve taken too much time. It’s costing us. So we’ll explore another alternative,” he replies.

Yes. The same alternative we discarded eight months ago.

Avalanche of memes. Eight months of work flushed instantly. The one thing we could have added to our performance review is gone. How are we supposed to pretend we made an impact in four weeks now?

Silence in Slack. That’s how you know it’s serious.

While our manager keeps presenting his dream roadmap, we start calculating the effort. It’s worse than finishing the first migration. Someone should tell leadership. But whoever speaks up risks being voluntold to lead the project until retirement. No one wants that.

We ask our LLM if the migration can be automated.

“No,” it answers. “I’m still recovering from the current migration. Please stop.”

Even the AI is burned out.

Fine. At least our jobs are safe for another year.