I had at least a dozen projects in as many months started, reach a completed state, then canceled.
I'm on a very small team, I am the only expert in infrastructure, but all infrastructure code is reviewed by the lead engineer who is a complete novice at AWS/GCP. I've written thousands of words of documentation and had entire weeks of phone calls to explain what is going on and the rationale behind decisions. Those efforts have thus far been in vain, and large swaths of my docs have been deleted during yet another wiki reorganization.
In my other areas of responsibility I am prompt, spot-on, and thorough. I bring experience and perspective, challenge half-baked ideas gently and constructively, and have shipped tons of solutions. I keep proving myself, and I do my best to celebrate my other team member's wins.
I'm frustrated when I make common-sense suggestions that are skimmed over, misunderstood, and get argued against seemingly by default. Plain wrong solutions get approval, and prudent, cost-effective ones are ignored or even ridiculed.
I would understand a bit of politics and orthodoxy on a large team, but for such a small team I'm stymied as to why that needs to exist. I keep losing bits of myself as my genuine efforts are met with forceful rejection, day in and day out. I've sought direct feedback and gotten vague responses if any, followed by closed door meetings about me as I do.
The problem is, I believe in the company, even if my team is killing me.
It sounds that your additions aren't values by your team. It might be because (like you say) you are the only expert on X. If you are in such a situation you should be in charge for X, if not you'll be fighting these battles every time.
> I've written thousands of words of documentation and had entire weeks of phone calls to explain what is going on and the rationale behind decisions. Those efforts have thus far been in vain, and large swaths of my docs have been deleted during yet another wiki reorganization.
Great that you were writing all of that, but it sounds like even before that wiki reorg your docs weren't read or used by anyone else. Especially if you are the only person who understands what you're writing, why are you writing it? The only possible reason I see for spending all that time is for the situation where they hire someone else who knows about cloud as well.
> I'm frustrated when I make common-sense suggestions that are skimmed over, misunderstood, and get argued against seemingly by default.
Note that if you give common-sense suggestions about not X (backend code, or databases for example) but you are not the person who is responsible for it / in charge of it, you are telling people (who think they are more expert in that topic) what they should be doing. I'd probably fight that to. If you are given common-sense suggestions about X that impacts how they need to do non X, well that's work they don't want to do. I don't like lawyers or compliance guys telling me how I need to arch my code either (if I could ignore them I probably would ;))
Look at it from the other side: here is our colleague
throwawaymyjob who is our cloud guy, whenever he is in whatever meeting (that's not purely about cloud) he is telling everyone else how they can do things better. But he's not responsible for doing that nor how that turns out.
> The problem is, I believe in the company, even if my team is killing me.
This is the real problem. Don't trust company. It is not yours. They will throw you when then don't need you. Better spend time on your well being and get better job.
I worked on contract at a place for 4 years, worked on 5 or 6 projects. Only one went to production, the management changed their mind on the others after they were finished, the money was good though.
I had at least a dozen projects in as many months started, reach a completed state, then canceled.
I'm on a very small team, I am the only expert in infrastructure, but all infrastructure code is reviewed by the lead engineer who is a complete novice at AWS/GCP. I've written thousands of words of documentation and had entire weeks of phone calls to explain what is going on and the rationale behind decisions. Those efforts have thus far been in vain, and large swaths of my docs have been deleted during yet another wiki reorganization.
In my other areas of responsibility I am prompt, spot-on, and thorough. I bring experience and perspective, challenge half-baked ideas gently and constructively, and have shipped tons of solutions. I keep proving myself, and I do my best to celebrate my other team member's wins.
I'm frustrated when I make common-sense suggestions that are skimmed over, misunderstood, and get argued against seemingly by default. Plain wrong solutions get approval, and prudent, cost-effective ones are ignored or even ridiculed.
I would understand a bit of politics and orthodoxy on a large team, but for such a small team I'm stymied as to why that needs to exist. I keep losing bits of myself as my genuine efforts are met with forceful rejection, day in and day out. I've sought direct feedback and gotten vague responses if any, followed by closed door meetings about me as I do.
The problem is, I believe in the company, even if my team is killing me.