Work

17th Workaversary

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Today marks my 17th work anniversary. I haven’t done a retrospective of the numbers involved in a few years, so it felt like time for an update.

It’s still only been three companies: Thomson Reuters, Refinitiv, and now LSEG. Back in my 2022 update, I mentioned I was moving into a new role. Three years later, I’m still in that role. So here’s how the breakdown looks on this workaversary:

8 offices 2 continents 12 managers (4 of them just in the past 3 years) 7 different groups across those 17 years (though the lines blur a bit, since lately I’ve been helping out in a group outside my own)

The most important part isn’t the numbers, though. Even if it can feel a little discouraging to watch people you’ve known and liked move on, I still find the work exciting, the problems worth solving, and the culture a place I want to show up to every day.

Operations is Just Like The Fire Department Minus The Burning Buildings…

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Many years ago when I was working at a startup and my manager at the time (still a mentor to me today) was very adamant that I read Failure Is Not an Option by Gene Kranz. It’s about the NASA mission control from the earliest days of Mercury through Apollo. You might not know who Gene Kranz is however if you’ve seen the movie Apollo 13 he is the character portrayed by Ed Harris. The book is a fascinating read for anyone. I found it especially interesting since a lot of what I do in operations is planning for the unexpected and incident management when things do go badly.

The person suggesting I read the book wanted to have me model our group a lot like mission control. A lot of what I read and learned did carryover into day-to-day life running ops in a startup. When I began to realize though was we are much less like mission control then we are like a fire department. Yes we have to plan for the unexpected and have clear methods of work for what we do expect to happen when it comes to pass. We also need to think like the fire department. The most basic sense what that means is if you get a call that something’s wrong you show up like it’s a five alarm fire. Even if you think it’s just a cat in a tree you show up in full turnout gear ready to go. If it turns out to be just a cat in a tree one guy stays behind takes care of the situation and everyone else breaks and returns back to the station. However if what sounded like a cat in a tree turns out to be something more substantial you’re ready to go and you can jump into action.

What I just described is exactly what we do when starting an incident recovery call.  You have to act like Emergency services do. You have to constantly drill people. No matter what the situation sounds like you go in assuming the worst.  Even after false positive after false positive you still have to go into every situation like a major event. The alternative can be disastrous.

I originally wrote a version of this entry years ago after several large incidents me and my team had been handling. Its sentiment still holds true several years later.  Since then I have been using this analogy a lot. It holds true for me several groups later in dealing with incident management. What took me a little while to realise after first writing this is that the same analogy goes for training initiatives as well. When a fire department isn’t going on calls for maintenance in their equipment their drilling. In order to have quick reactions in situations they know they have to work together as a team and drill together the scenarios that likely will come up. In the group I managed at the time I wrote this we did a lot of training.  To the point where people were complaining of training. Yet the outcome of the drills and training were reaction times improved a noticeable amount. No one can be expected to be shown something once and be executed perfectly six months later when it comes up again. We all need to constantly drill using the tools we have while working together in common likely scenarios that may come up.

At the time of first writing another example of Ops acting like the fire department was we had a situation that put the fire department mentality to the test. We received an email around a problem that had been kicking around with others for two days. At first pass it didn’t sound like it was much to do with our group however it didn’t feel right. We were not sure what was going on so we made the decision to mobilise to rule anything out. It was the right decision. The lead of our incident recovery call confirmed after a few hours that there was a problem, identified the upstream service, and got the right people engaged to solve the issue. The same type of thing could have come in and been nothing. Many times it is nothing. By mobilising we headed off a potentially worse problem.

In that group back in 2016 my manager at the time gave me a baseball bat that I kept at my desk.  He used to use it when talking to people to tell them if they ran into issues he could help with getting things done.  He gave it to me in a very public way to show my team I could do the same for them. It was an important symbolic gesture. I never really used it but it was nice to roll around on the floor or otherwise fidget with it during a long incident. When I moved out of that operations group to a more delivery role the person who took over from me was a good friend of mine.  I made a very public hand over to him of the same bat. When still doing day to day operations stuff I had been meaning to get around to buying a fire hat. I feel that is more appropriate token to have around. Now a days its less appropriate since I am not doing operations / application support.

 

15 Years

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I wanted to write something to mark my 15th anniversary at LSEG (Thomson Reuters, Refinitiv, LSEG). So much has changed with me and the world . Yet I still get excited by a view like this one out of our conference room during a workshop today. It’s a very different view from my memorable ones out of the office in Times Square or Docklands, but just as energising.

It also helps to still be working with people who make every day fun even after 15 years.

6,000 Days

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A totally random useless yet nostalgic data point for today. It has been 6,000 days since I started at Thomson Reuters. I thought the nice round number was cool.

I would never have guessed were that journey would take me, yet here i am a divestiture, and acquisition later in another continent.

Photo taken outside 3 Times Square after i accepted the offer and before i started.

A New Role at Work

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I can finally say that I have started a new role today at work. Saying I have moved roles isn’t new.  I have done so on average about every 1 to 2 years over the past 14 years at Thomson Reuters / Refinitiv / LSEG. This change feels different. Since as far back as 2018 it became clear to me that I wanted to do more in the Security area of Technology vs the Operational area that had been working in. Since then I have tried to spend as much time as I could personally and professionally in the security area with my main role still being operationally focused.

In 2020 right before COVID-19 hit I applied for a role in a Security Architecture group. The timing was not good due to the pandemic. At the time i was a bit disappointed however it worked out in the long run. A few months later another role presented itself that was still in Operations (Reliability Engineering). It was however a good career progression for me. I wouldn’t have thought to go out for it until prompted.  Advise from that is listen to people you trust.

Flashing forward to this year I was interested in a role that came up. I was talking to my previous manager about it. She was very encouraging and gave me some advise i did not initially act on. A few months later I approached someone doing a similar role I was interested in. I was looking for advise on what I could do to beef up my skills so I could apply for the role. The response I got was I should just apply. So I did.

I got the offer in late July.  I have been transitioning with ever increasing amounts of time in the new role since August.  Today is the first day I am full time in the new role.  It is a bit anticlimactic since i have been spending most of my time in the role for most of October.

What is funny to me is the role is very different in many ways however at the core is still the concepts of DEV SEC OPS. It is just approaching the problems from a different angle. That is overly simplifying things a bit  How i go about my work is vastly different now.  There is also so much to learn however that is the fun part.

Now I need to start explaining to people what a BISO is and stop explaining what Reliability Engineering is. I do have some confidence now that my wife will stop telling people (very incorrectly) that I am a project manager.

It’s Time To Suit Up For Work

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It’s been 17 months (give or take) since I last ventured to an office to work. That all changes today as I reset that clock. I am heading into this office for the first time. We moved the week after lock down so I have never worked out of the site I am going to. Even though I was there once and it is only across from the old site.

This outing started out as a get together for someone who was leaving. Along the way I got re-ogres (a little more on that maybe another time). So what was a meet up also turned into a half day meeting to talk about the new team.

For the occasion I decided to Suit Up. I forgot how comfortable my Ministry of Supply suit was. Even if I make the office trip semi regular I may need to get another one of them.

For full disclosure and clarity I wrote this post a few weeks ago when I first went into the office. Since then I have been in 3 times. Today being the third so I decided to finally publish this.

Photo is from when I was in NY and trying on said suit while debating on buying it.

The Origin Of my Origin Stories

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For my birthday I felt a bit nostalgic. I finally will post this entry I wrote almost a year ago. I simply had a lot I wrote and never was sure when to post it. So here I am.

For over a year now (I started writing this post in Jan 2020) I have been thinking about things I am interested in writing about. As much as I like to share, this blog is really for me to just write above all else. That is why I jump around to several different unrelated topics. In thinking about what I write about or want to write about I broke down my writing into a few different categories. Some of them like technology or writing about the girls I’ve been doing for a while. Writing about life as an ex-pat is also not really new anymore either.

There are some distinctly new categories I decided to focus some time on as well. One of which is stories about my dad. The inspiration for that came about around the time he died. In talking about all the funny interesting stories about him he got thinking that I wanted to write some of them down. I have written and posted a few already. There are many more I just haven’t wanted to address however they seem like pretty good stories.

After I started brainstorming about ideas to write about my dad I realized I probably want to write about some things about my childhood and things that happend long ago (aka childhood or single life). The working “category” for those are my origin stories. This particular post was inspired because there’s one story I want to tell. As I started thinking about how to tell it, I realized it is really three separate stories. Each one related and building off the other one. Or that is how it flows for me. As I fleshed those stories out I realised there are more beyond those that I find interesting and would want to tell.

Another category I don’t write a lot about is work. I used to do that often. If you search the archives of this blog you’ll find many work-related posts. There used to be more. However I documented previously how I had to curtail that due to minor issue while working at Parksearch. Nothing bad happened. It was actually pretty funny, even when it happened. I can’t seem to find the right keyword to find that story or else I would share it now. Long story short I originally wrote about work long before it was common and became probilimatic with conflicts of interest. Now I simply do not do it to be safe.

If I orchestrate this properly this intro post will go up right before I start posting some origin stories. Now all I have to do is go write them.

The photo in this post is of a rocket launch pad my dad had at our beach club in the late 1980’s. My dad and rockets will be a post at some point however when looking for a photo that best sums up any origin stories i thought a rocket one was the most appropriate.

Server Need a Spa Day

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I learnt something new at work this week. Apparently when you’re moving servers and computer equipment large distances when it gets to its destination it needs to rest for a few hours. I am assured they don’t need massages or comfortable beds. Or if we want that it’s only in the premium package.