Myopia

Near the end of my second week at the new job, I might finally be winding down from the stress of the change. By noon on the first day alone, my neck was as stiff as steel and everything went downhill from there as I crashed into a black depression. I was not expecting such an intense reaction. There are multiple factors at play but the most important one was the loss of laughter. Despite all the turmoil at my last job, I genuinely laughed for the first time in three years and had not laughed so much since college - seventeen years ago. People make a difference. I hope I don't have to wait another seventeen years.

My Self-Esteem In Dollars

Ok, so here is the situation: I get a job offer that would include a .8% raise. With my skillset, I am currently making 16% under my market value. I have been the least-paid software developer in any given company for about the past five or six years.

Mistake #1: I stayed at the same company for six years and allowed myself to be drastically underpaid and endured a company-wide salary-freeze for at least three of those years. My skillset and experience grew but my salary did not.

Mistake #2: When I went to my next job I gave my salary history. Because it was already low, the company thought I could start at less than market value. I still demanded somewhat more pay and got it but was still under-market value significantly. I did not believe my skills were good enough and actually felt guilty because I thought I demanded too much and was over-paid.

Mistake #3: When I went to my next job I again gave my salary history. Because it was already low, the company thought I could start at less than market value. I had just been downsized and felt terribly inept and took what they gave me without any negotiations.

Mistake #4: In my most recent interview for a new job I again gave my salary history. Because it was already low, the company thought I could start at less than market value. This is the company that offerred me the .8% salary increase. After they made the offer, I agreed to it and went back to my desk and thought a while.

Software development is not as lucrative as some fields but is much more lucrative than most. Because so few of the population can program at all, much less program ingeniously, a mediocre programmer can make more than the average worker. I am grateful for this and thankful that I can program mediocrely but something is not right. It was just a month or so ago that I was getting offers that would make for AT LEAST a 16% raise. I did not take them because I was holding out for a job closer to home with a better commute.

So I then walk over to the cube of a co-worker and started to discuss salaries. I found out that, again, I am the least-paid developer in the department and that everyone else is making AT LEAST 15% more than I. My co-worker informs me of what I should demand given my skillset, education, and extensive experience. I decided to take a stand.

I phoned the potential employer back and informed them that I am no negotiator but it is past time for me to stop settling for less than my market value; thus, I refused the job. He stated that he would run it by his boss and get back to me. I did not care, I was tired of being taken advantage of just because I don't feel very confident in myself, I am too nice, am female, and tend to be loyal to a company regardless of their treatment. I informed them that had give them my minimum salary requirements and would not take less.

To my surprise, the potential employer sent me a revised offer later in the day increasing my offer from a .8% increase to a 12.4% increase. That still puts me at 3.6% under market value; however, due to the high desireability of the job and opportunities, I will probably accept the offer tomorrow.

It is time for me to move along in the world on many fronts so let's go. I just hope I can stop giving potential employer's my damn salary history.

Corporate Hell #4

After eleven months of working in a hippie-firm, coming and going as I please, wearing sandals and tee-shirts, yesterday marked my first day back in corporate helldom.

Hopefully, it will be better than my last trip through the cubes but I can't say it has started out so great. Like I mentioned, I had become accustomed to getting up when I want and the last month of unemployment didn't help. Stupidly, I drank almost 16 ounces of Rockstar Energy that morning. That's really nothing terribly new for me when I am in the firm clutches of slumber but this time I drank without anything solid in my stomach and I paid for that the rest of the day.

The fall in the parking lot also didn't help as I had to start my first day at work with a bloody and swollen hand. Nice.

deroBored

For the past sixteen days I have been unemployed for the first time in my life since I started working at a "real" job. On one hand, I do not want to return to work yet on the other hand, well, IT'S MAKING ME EVEN CRAZIER THAN I WAS BEFORE! ...uhm, sorry...

It wouldn't be so bad if I weren't trapped indoors due to the combination of this incredible heat wave and the flu. That's right, I've caught the winter flu in the middle of summer. An unknown force is surely trying my craziness for the purpose of motivating me to get a new job just to escape this misery. Otherwise, I would be stark-raving delirious with the happiness of a school-kid released into the summer freedom of swimming and fun.

Strangely, it doesn't seem like it's been over two weeks. Information Technology professionals are in high demand which means I have been almost constantly on the phone and emailing regarding thirty different positions in my 20-mile radius alone.

Yes, I do realize how fortunate I am to be in a field where you really don't have to be any good at what you do and I am thankful. If you are a mediocre kiddie-scripter you will be in demand and I am very VERY mediocre.

I often get the interview question "can you describe the difference between polymorphism and inheritance in .NET?" I think I get asked this because so few people really know so I give them the same answer: "the difference between polymorphism and inheritance == (the profit of Microsoft creating new verbiage every couple of years so that they can sell semi-new technology that require costly training and certification * the number of developers and managers desperate enough to pay for a few more letters after their names).

Anyway, Microsoft career problems are for another blog. The fact is that I need fresh air that has oxygen in it and a nose clear enough to breathe it. I'm not supposed to be spending money being that I'm unemployed so shopping and the cinema are ruled out. I tried going to the library further study the advanced features of the .NET 2.0 Framework but it was FREEZING in there and a poltergeist again took control of my nasal passages.

I've watched numerous DVDs and caught up on video games, started 2 new aquariums, and read a couple of novels amidst toting around town meeting with the headhunters. I even feel like I'm getting enough sleep.

In fact, even this post is boring me (look how long it is!) so I'm done for today.

Corporate Hell #3 SP1

Another night on the floor has arrived. It feels like a wicked cornstalk is creeping it's way from my stomach up to my throat about to strangle me. I took only a half-effexor again this morning and will take a whole tomorrow morning in another attempt at titration. If that doesn't work then screw it, I'll take the drug.

I've been blaming myself for my piss-poor performance at the new job. I'm not even good at math so I don't know what I was thinking when I decided to switch careers. I'd been contemplating a new career path and then, in desparation, I installed the 350+MB beta Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2005 and many things worked that did not work before.

I have a long history of blaming myself for situations out of my control. I'd rather have a questionable internal locus of control than feel helpless. One one hand, helpless is so much horrible but on the other hand it is at least some sort of reality. It really doesn't matter because either way I end up wanting to do train-diving.

Regardless, I'm still no genius and cannot read binary code without a tool so if I'm going to be mediocre then why bother. It took at least an hour this morning for me to reverse engineer some gwbasic code to locate and decipher just one of the formulas I need. I'm fairly certain that my mediocrity is glaringly evident at the new job and the VS2005 disaster that killed my deadlines has worsened it ten times over. Being homeless and on the street completely alone is a worst fear of mine so I should discuss my status with the boss and get it over with.

The floor is not completely hard. I took the memory-foam off the bed and folded it in half.

Corporate Hell #3

It's been three weeks since my escape from the depths of the labyrinth cubes in Corporate Helldom to my current desk in the world of small business life. Wildly tossed about and holding on for dear life, I feel as if I have jumped from one the Titanic to the Minnow. At least this boat is not sinking...as far as I know.

Living for so long in the irritating safety of red tape dulled my technical skillset and now I am playing catch up by desparately coding into all hours of the nights and weekends. I may be getting too old for this.

Fortunately, a couple of times per week there are other refugees from the old place seeking asylum elsewhere and this is beneficial for me because I enjoy the happy-hour-freedom-parties. However, back at the Titanic, the multi-million dollar disaster continues to reek all hell and the hired-gun continues to net up the fish.

You can usually get a profile of any employee by what is on his or her desk but you can TRULY spot a sharp and savvy Information Systems (IS) employee by what is NOT on the desk. This is for two related reasons:

1. When things go really bad in IS, they go REALLY REALLY VERY bad. From the business-critical databases to the core functioning networking of the company, if something goes majorly wrong there is no time to grab stuff off the desk before either running out the door or getting booted out the door. Having access to highly crucial systems means no two-week notices if you are to go because that gives you time to bring down the vessel.
   
2. In addition, the higher you go, the further you fall. More reason NOT to keep personal items on your desk and another sign of your savviness.
   

Naive out-of-touch staff do not realize this and oogle over their photos, figurines, and plants.

As a side note, staff with "attitude-issues" keep the Daily Dilbert on their desks. I took mine home before I ever gave resignation and it now sits alone with me at my new desk on the Minnow as I again struggle to keep afloat.

Corporate Hell #2

A whole is supposedly equal to the "sum of it's parts" but in corporate life I'd say it's more like the "average" -- the average of upper management, that is. Everything trickles down from the top and if the top is full of crap...well, you know.

I tend to look at such matters from a systems-theory viewpoint where everyone is part of a set of relationships and dynamics that are either constructive or destructive. Everyone plays off of their dependencies with one another and so on... However, if the core of the system is full of crap...well, you know.

I really don't care about this whole fecal ecosystem and they can all be left aflame in a paper-bag on a doorstep for all I care. The problem, as always, occurs when truly good-hearted and hard-working people get sucked into these smelly hurricanes.

Let me give you a real example: Greg is the CEO playboy-wanna-be yes-man who hires John the manager playboy-wanna-be yes-man so that he can build his "good-ole boys club." John hires Joan the Barbie-like supervisor, for obvious reasons, who has no business knowledge (or, really, ANY knowledge.) Joan hires Sally the average employee because she can unconsciously relate to her. Sally is married to a man who can't hold a job and makes his living off of creating workman's comps claims. Sally cheats on her timecard, enters fake data because she is too lazy to do her job, and has nooners with Mary Jane (meaning pot.) As a result, the company sucks, business crashes, the board calls in a hired-gun and the restructuring begins.

In the meantime, there is Ann who has been with the company for the past ten years and has been quite faithful by working hard, not missing work, and advancing herself. Likewise, Mike has been with the company for the past eight years and has earned a much-deserved six weeks of vacation which he likes to spend with his kids while they are young.

But when the restructuring occurs, Ann and Mike get demoted to jobs beneath them while Sally comes out unscarred. The restructuring takes five-plus years and people develop depression, high blood pressure, insomnia, ulcers, and heart disease.

We have all kinds of basic human rights but screw anything of a higher-level. Now that employers can just do a mass e-mail of pink-slips to 400 members of their staff...well, you know.

Back to the system's theory and the average of parts, corporate life is really like any other organism from a single cell to a government to a nation. It all comes down to the core and that is you and I. If you change yourself for the better then you have changed the world, correct?

I don't know. Tell this to Mike who had to get a new job and miss his eldest son's graduation or Ann who invested her skills in a company who demoted her to work under staff more than half her age. Why do we bother?

http://www.workplacefairness.org

Corporate Hell #1

I really do see dead people. Each day that I go into the cubicle trenches I see at least one more person whose light has went out; that is, if that person is even there anymore. For simplicity sake, I'll call it a "corporate buyout." No one knows when the ax is going to come or where it will come from. For a while, there was an average of one ambulance a week carting someone off for some stress-related ailment.

Workers just disappear. At 5pm on one day a person will be at his or her desk with family photos and piles of work but come 8am the next day all is gone. I have contemplated filing missing persons reports. Complete Twilight Zone -- no one knows -- people are just GONE.

Not all are average employees but are management who devoted their lives to the company when it was a small startup of ten people. The faithful (or, to be somewhat rude, stupid) who have even had salaries frozen for the past three years (for the sake of the company) are gone. Yep, I have been one of the faithful/stupid.

Despite my best efforts, the bitterness has engulfed my every being and turned me into a giant pus-filled nasty disgusting filthy black acidic canker sore that just keeps on blowing open. The high blood pressure and migraines and insomnia and ... have to go but leaving is alike trying to break through of an abusive relationship with your spouse. All self-esteem has been reduced to nothing and there is no gas to go.

So today I resigned anyway, screw them -- whoever they are. God be with those still there because no one else will.