// July 13th, 2009 // No Comments » // IT Insider Information
Even when I was down on myself for the failures of my first Yellow experience I picked myself up and got sent out again. This time it was to a lovely bank on the east coast. It was the same client security product but this time they had to throw in a twist and make half the server implementation Novell Netware 5. Yep, that’s right Netware 5 in 2006, because updating your Novell from a product released in 1998 isn’t a good idea or anything… Anyway I basically went through the same treatment as before but I handled the stress a little bit better this time. I bought a Network book and was reading it and the administrator guides for the client security product at night and working during the day. After giving them a rollout plan over a two week period I was able to go home. A week later I got the reviews and they were a bit better than the first project but still basically a big F.
At this point I was beginning to wonder what I was doing. How can a company keep sending me out without formal training and just letting me dive in head first? The answer was money. The security company was paying high rates for the professional services and they wouldn’t just fire us for bad grades, they would just throw more money at the problem. So the company I was working for would continue to make money in hopes that our grades would improve over time and just like anything else in life they did improve, but not without a significant amount of stress on all of us.
I forgot to mention that through out all of this I was still supporting companies that I worked with locally. So I was stressing out about the current security projects and doing support for existing customers. This was all because there were not enough engineers available to handle the load so the local clients were paying good money and suffering all so the company could try to make more money on enterprise clients. Another reason why it wasn’t fair to them and why IT companies that do this are wrong and deserve to lose customers.
My final two major projects for this company involved a large bank in Pittsburgh and a large automobile company in Michigan. The bank turned out fine because I’d already lumbered through a few client security deployments so I was a seasoned veteran by then and I could speak the lingo with the customer. However, when you have one good project you are doomed to get one that is horrible….
I am not a Linux or Unix junkie by any means. I do not hate Linux or Unix I just choose to spend my time focusing on what makes money and sadly they don’t. So not being an expert at Linux and Unix would normally mean that you wouldn’t get stuck doing an IT compliance auditing project for a Fortune 500 Auto company right? Well in the world of IT you would be dead wrong. I got stuck trying to manage a project that involving a product that was technically being phased out but because it was already bought and paid for the big Yellow Giant decided they wanted to support it. The acronym for this lovely project is ESM. So being the great IT professional that I am I went directly to my local book store and picked up books on Solaris and Linux and read through them trying to gain a better understanding of what I was up against. I quickly realized I was screwed.
I went straight to the owner of the company and voiced my opinion that he really should bring in someone who had experience with using the product and deploying it in both a Windows and Unix world. However, he refused and told me to work harder on the project. So instead of work harder I chose to work smarter. I immediately put my resume up at multiple locations to find a new job that wouldn’t treat me like this. The amount of stress I was under was causing lack of sleep and general health problems. I had just had enough of the crap that went on in that company and had to get out. Lucky for me I found another job that I thought was going to be better. I emailed my boss to ask him if he were going to be in the office the next day but he responded that he was stuck out of town.
Now I had a dilema. I had to give my two weeks notice but I didn’t want to do it over the phone. I called the owner up and started to talk to him about some stuff. He said I was in line to get a big raise but that wasn’t enough for me. My mental and physical health were more important to me than money so I told him I was going to quit. He took it well but I knew that he was going to try to find out where I was going and try to hold a non-compete agreement over my head. Lucky for me I chose to do a contract job so he had no recourse against me.
I thought for sure that I would never make the two weeks because prior people had been told to go home and not come back. However, for some reason the owner made me work out the entire two weeks. I ended up having an exit interview with him the final day of my two weeks. He asked me where I was going and why. I told him flat out that the goals and the direction of the company didn’t match mine. I also told him I didn’t appreciate the treatment I received and that he needed to stop being in the business and work on the business instead.
This is just a peak into what has happened to me in the past 5 years. I will hopefully provide more interesting stories moving forward as I explore further into my career and what really happens in IT firms.
