If you're an avid follower of my blog, then first off thanks for being one of the few. Or even one of the one. Secondly, you must have noticed that I have taken a bit of a break from blogging as of late. There are several reasons for that, first and foremost has been writer's block. I simply couldn't think of anything to write about. My other two reasons for my blogging hiatus are more personal, as I recently celebrated the birth of my third child and started a new job. For this
post, I will be focusing on the latter of these events, that of starting a new position with a new company, and the journey along with all the struggles along the way.
Deciding to go
Up until I made the hard decision to leave, I would have told you that I would be with my old company until I retired. So why leave? If it was that good there that I was willing to stay employed as long as they'd have me, what could make me place my loyalties elsewhere? Well to put it simply, the job was never really that great. The only reason I stayed as long as I did was my coworkers. I was lucky enough to be hired into a group that had similar interests, ideologies, and sense of humor. It wasn't so much a place of work, as it was more like a locker room where work got done. They made everything else tolerable... until it was too much. The beginning of the end was when my original boss, the man who hired me and the best person anyone could ever ask to work for, was forced to leave via underhanded politics and mistreatment by upper-management.
Placing blame
Senior management's mistreatment of its employees did not end there. In the weeks and months following I came to realize just how bad it was, as my own search for new employment revealed that things were much worse than I had initially known. We had always known that we were treated as an afterthought in many ways. We were given tasks to do with little more than a tertiary explanation of what we were to produce. The kind of brief summary that wouldn't even cut as a TL;DR post on Twitter. Along with the lack of information, these tasks would also be given to us days, or sometimes hours before the deadline when the rest of the company realized they weren't getting any updates only to find they "forgot" to put in the formal request. The blame fell squarely on our shoulders when said project didn't meet the untold requirements or fell behind schedule due to the unrealistic timetable that was given. Whether that tactic was truly an "accident" every time or done purposely since they knew they would get away with it, I'll never know for sure; though some people are more suspect than others. Bottom line, nobody had our back, so when it was even hinted that we were to blame... we were at fault.
Bottom of the hill
Had that been the end of it I could have lived with it. But the straw that broke the camels back for me was the fact that any time some new technology or equipment was brought into the company, it somehow always became the responsibility of my former department to not only learn it, but to get it up and working flawlessly, despite the fact that all those jobs, along with the ongoing use and maintenance, SHOULD have fallen outside the scope of our positions. Asking a web developer to set up the web servers and put all security on their shoulders is like asking a plumber to construct the whole house since their pipes will go inside it. Sure they're both construction jobs, but plumping and general contracting are two different jobs with different standards qualifications. But once again, nobody had our backs, so when the rest of the company put their hands in the air and said "not it", it fell on us. And even if we proved that said job should be done by another department and was not best practice for us to do, we got a smile and told "that's ok, you can handle it".
Burning bridges
Now please don't misunderstand me, not everyone treated us like this. There were some bright spots who were a joy to work with. The very few that I am friends with on social media that will probably read this, if I haven't told you to your face how much I enjoyed working with you personally then I meant to. And if I did say it, it was 100% legit. It's because of you that I stayed so long, and hopefully, if some of these issues are resolved and you're still there we may end up working together again. My complaints, as stated above, are primarily with "upper-management". Those faceless bureaucrats who I never had the pleasure of meeting or speaking with. The stereotypical stuffed suits that sit in their corner offices and make decisions based on what benefits them personally the most, with little regard for the employees or customers. This probably is farthest from the truth, but that's how I like to imagine it. It's a lot easier to blame a nefarious, over-the-top villainous puppet-master orchestrating everything to purposely try their underlings' sanity; rather than just being overlooked and underappreciated by someone who is blissfully ignorant of how bad they are making things.