Arielle Quintero

Operations. Writes about the hours other people's systems quietly take, and how to get them back.

Why I write

I work in operations. In practice that means I am the person a process breaks on. If a handover is going to fail, it fails at my desk, and then I am the one working out why.

I care about this more than the subject probably deserves, and I would rather say why than pretend it is only professional interest. A working week is a finite number of hours out of a finite life. A badly designed process spends them without asking, and we have a whole vocabulary for not noticing: admin, overhead, just how things are here. I think it is the quiet theft of the one thing nobody gets more of, and almost nobody is angry about it.

Writing is where I find out what I actually think, which is rarely what I assumed on the way in. It is also the only part of my week that is not reactive. Not a request, not a fire, not somebody else's deadline arriving on my desk at five. I get to finish a thought. I did not expect to love that as much as I do.

So I write about the half of the transaction the demo leaves out. Which tasks are worth automating and which ones only look like they are. What a small team needs in place before it grows. What to charge, and how to say no. Whether the thing you adopted removed the work or just moved it somewhere you will find it in March.

I write for people who inherited a mess they cannot unilaterally fix, because that is the situation almost everybody is actually in, and almost no advice is addressed to it.

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