I fix things other people design broken

It started out as something of a joke at first, but after the last couple of months and the kind of stuff I’ve been doing the title became a personal mantra of sorts.

Not only does it aptly describe what I do these days (and probably the average of the last ten years or so) in a nutshell, it is also oddly holistic - it defines not just what I do, but the kind of problems I face, the mood of the industry I have to do it in, and whom I have to do it with.

Telcos have layer upon layer of legacy technology and business logic that requires constant tinkering to adapt to new challenges, and regardless of how well any company copes with it, quite often things are broken by all sorts of inside and outside influences - previous designers, conflicting requirements, clueless outsourcers, pushy vendors, (mostly good) competitors, marketeers from cloud nine¹, swinging market tendencies, and, of course, the latest shiny ga^gets and technological fads.

And I get to deal with all of it, in mostly the same way as Dilbert and for mostly the same reasons:

Now that that’s off my chest, I’ll just add the above sentence to my .signature and be done with it.

Y’all take care, now.