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Absolutely 0 had ever paid off. Probably worst was trusting too much a colleague perceived by everybody as Oracle/plsql guru, when troubleshooting vendor's abysmal performance of DB queries during some bigger migration (up to half an hour easily, for trivial 30 million rows). He didn't see any issue on DB side, pointed to useless oracle hints, crappy JDBC drivers, spring's jdbc templates, possibly my not-optimal code etc. I went over my head, did probably the most complex code in my life, massively parallel, over weekends and evenings. That wonderful cathedral didn't move performance a zilch, just made debugging and further changes much harder. After few hours of actual debugging afterwards he found out vendor defined responsible DB table in such an obscure and bad way way that we had to literally copy whole table to another more sane one, and perform all the work there in maybe 5% of the time. In fact I suggested exactly same thing initially but it was quickly dismissed by him, and who questions the guru, right. This didn't even come from management just colleague's incompetence/ego, hard deadlines, tons of pressure to deliver, and starting project already 2 months late. Closest I've been to burnout yet. I am still a bit pissed off on him, but I know it was not malice so that eases emotions quite a bit. And to similar request coming from the top - been there, done that too, regretted that time & energy put in it. These days, 8 hours days, if I am not making it on time, I communicate early & clearly and that's it. They handle it, and if they don't, well there is always next job. Life is about priorities. |