For those who don’t know:
- My employer, ITS Consulting, is a consulting company; they hire out to other businesses to solve IT/tech challenges.
- In 2016 I was in a near-fatal crash, while cycling home from work, that has left me with multiple challenges and thus far I’ve only been able to work part time at 20hrs a week, max 26-28.
January-May, 2022 I’ll be working full-time again. I am aware of the “optics” of this coming just months after the lawsuit was settled for the 2016 crash. I was absolutely open & honest with lawyers & doctors on both sides of the lawsuit, maybe too honest according to my lawyers.
How This Came About
In Oct/Nov 2021 a bug came to light in a web app I am responsible for. The bug, at the time, was extremely severe, high priority for the client, and would have critical impact on their users. A meeting was cancelled at short notice and I experienced a great deal of stress around the impact and root cause of this bug. Upon investigation I determined that I had documented/warned of this bug in May 2021 and the files had not been edited in 2+ years (I’ve been on this project for 1.5 years).
So, I experience a huge amount of stress, mental/emotional hangover, and self-doubt all around a bug I had warned of and had not caused.
My Proposed Solution
I can continue experiencing the massively negative impacts of old, known bugs in a horrible code-base. The impact of this and a few previous bugs had been quite bad precisely because of my past brain injury and ongoing challenges.
Or, I could suck it up, suffer for 4-5 months, and rebuild the entire app with modern application architecture, decent logging, and a decent code-base.
I honestly think the negative impact of working full-time for 4-5 months will, hopefully, be less than the unexpected, surprise negative impacts of these legacy bugs rearing their ugly heads.
The Result
My employer, the owner of the company, agreed with my assessment and agreed with my code review and documentation from May 2021; the entire thing needs to be rebuilt.
My employer presented this proposal to the client and they agreed.
What is most significant here, in my opinion, is that my employer quoted this complete app rebuilt on a “fixed price”. That means, the client pays a large lump sum up-front and if the rebuild project goes over budget (scheduled delivery) they will not be charged more money.
I am genuinely flattered that my employer has enough faith in me to quote a fixed price on a project plan that I wrote and will be the primary provider on. I can only assume/hope this means over the past 1.5 years I have proven my project plans/schedule accurate and proven my ability to communicate early & often when things are not going to plan. Bottom line, my employer is taking a risk based on my ability to make accurate predictions.
End of the Day
At the end of the day I want to be very [VERY] clear that this was not planned and only came to be late December 2021. This is not related to the crash lawsuit settlement. I have been, and continue to be, completely open & honest with medical/legal professionals. And, my thought here is that a few months of hard work & suffering is better than years of intermittent, surprise suffering if I continue working part-time and don’t rebuild this legacy app.
There will, unfortunately, be impacts on me, my family, and my friends. I will have to socialize less. I will have to ride my bike less. There is a great deal of risk that I could be an angrier person, easily frustrated, or easily triggered. I guarantee that I will become forgetful. And unfortunately will eat more junk-food. Pre-crash I used to easily work 12-14 hours a day 5-6 days a week.
All of these negative impacts on me are crash-related.