Employed folks of the pit, I need some perspective. I'll try to keep this short and sweet, but it's really hard to fully describe.
For context, I'm a PhD student who opted to exit the constant turnover of teaching and research assistantships and seek the stability of a full-time job while I write my dissertation. In case any of you know me, yes I'm still working on this and also shut up. I was fortunate to land a well-paying job (at least for someone who has never made any real money) as a scientist at the university. I've been there a little under 6 months, 1/3 of which was routine onboarding.
The situation I've found myself in is this:
1) The team needs to produce a new round of deliverables by summer.
2) To do this, they need to use a coding pipeline that was last run in 2021. It has not been maintained since then.
3) The last person in my position is still around but has moved to another team. My supervisor was formerly in my position but never ran this pipeline.
4) Very important: Everything in this organization is bespoke and custom. All the pipelines, models, functions, etc. were built and maintained in-house. All of this code was written by someone in 2017, patched up to keep running by 2-3 people since then, and hasn't been overhauled ever. Google cannot help me.
5) There's a smattering of team-specific materials online but it's sporadic and hasn't been very well maintained. Organizational updates are also documented online but not in a way that's easy to follow. Mostly, people who have been around just "know things" from being there.
6) They hired me, an outsider, to more or less learn the organization, learn the overall process, learn all the details, debug the whole thing, fold in new data, and produce new estimates.
7) No one seems to know how large of a task this is, not least for an outsider.
8) Leadership, looking at the progress I've made and looking at our deadlines, are starting to panic. They ask what resources I need and I don't know what to tell them because my whole thing thus far has been running code, finding an error, tracing it back somewhere, either fixing it or asking about it, and learning that "oh yeah, that thing changed two years ago" or that the problem is a user-written function with a deprecated parameter hard-coded inside. In other words, the resource I need is institutional knowledge, which I'm gaining quite rapidly but only through the process of grinding away at this shit.
9) The only real advice my supervisor has given me is to work harder/faster/longer because our boss really wants to hit these deadlines. He's very anxious.
10) They've warned me to start working overtime now to avoid sleepless nights closer to our deadlines.
My problems:
1) Obviously, I'm not having a great time. It's clear to me that it's their fault their shit is in bad condition and they brought me in with no other instruction but to "fix it" but do it faster somehow. I don't see how it's possible to just make things happen faster.
2) My mental health is important to me and I really don't want to carry their anxiety.
3) I have no time to finish my dissertation or otherwise live the life I want to live.
4) I'm union and technically am contracted to 40-hour workweeks (the employees unionized in 2021 because the org had a terrible reputation due to operating like a tech company even though we're public employees).
Considerations:
1) By now, I'm sort of an expert at this particular thing. At least more so than anyone else not in the org. It would take 6-9 months to get anyone else to this point.
2) They'd be fucked if I quit and I don't want to leave them in a lurch because I'm a decent human being.
3) I'm thinking hard about what I want out of a life and job and while making money is great, I don't want to opt to spend my precious time doing this/feeling this way.
In the evergreen words of David Byrne, "How do I work this?"
