Wish Me Luck....

[FranTastic444]

After 16 years working for the same company, I'm having initial discussions with another organisation tomorrow about going to work for them.

I realised for a while that a change is gonna come, but seeing what is effectively my job being advertised has convinced me I need to step up the escape plan.

Sad really - employee number 8 into an IT startup which went on to be sold for $$$$millions. I'd hoped to see out my working days at this place, but my manager is changing the way that projects are delivered which will reduce my involvement to that of a bit-part

[Caultron]

Best of luck on your job search!

[crfriend]

Well that doth stink, Fran. Best wishes in finding a new gig!

[Sinned]

Well, Fran, been there and done it. fd was a fantastic place to work in until HSBC took over the parent company Midland Bank. HSBC left fd alone while they picked apart the Midland brand but once that was complete they turned their spotlight onto fd. Once they had a programme of replacing upper management with HSBC ones the writing was on the wall. A gradual outflux of personnel with me being one of them. The skills that were wanted were not the ones I had and I had no love for the rigid corporateness. A real bummer I know, but in the end I'm a lot happier with very little stress, bp in the 120/125 over 80/85 range, cholesterol only slightly raised and glucose levels in control in the 5 to 8 range. Life is good .... except for a certain opposition to my skirts. I certainly hope that things work out for you and that your happiness rating improves.

[Gregg1100]

I never had much respect for a good few of the the managers(?????) I came across in 49 years of working life. Most of them were little better than useless--more scary was who the clowns were who gave them the jobs in the first place. The bigger the company, the larger amount of fools in charge.

[r.m.anderson]

I never had much respect for a good few of the the managers(?????) I came across in 49 years of working life. Most of them were little better than useless--more scary was who the clowns were who gave them the jobs in the first place. The bigger the company, the larger amount of fools in charge.

Ah ha the "Peter Principle" or the latter day USA newspaper cartoon comic strip "Dilbert".
The promotion of managers to the level of their incompetence.

I was once being questioned about company policy and the sound of silence was deafening
when I answered "How often the company management cooked with the oven door OPEN
expecting the same results as with the door CLOSED" !
Ah hem changing the subject moving forward on to other things !

The ONLY managers I had real respect for were those that worked their way up through the ranks.

[FranTastic444]

Guys - thanks so much for your comments. Much appreciated when I'm on a bit of a downer.

Good initial chat with my new contact. Some avenues for us to explore, but also some potential legal blockers (around non-compete / non-poach clauses in contracts).

Sinned - interesting that you mention HSBC / Midland. I have been a software vendor to both over the years.

[Sinned]

FT444, I worked in IT for fd for 9 years and it was such an unusual company to work for. For example, on completion of a major project we would have an fd-wide celebration with food, soft drinks [0] and entertainment such as clowns, balloon persons. By the time HSBC made their influence felt and introduced loads of red tape and over-management all that went and somehow, the fun just went out of the company. My face no longer fit as they say and I was glad to leave. To give an example of how to demoralise people. Under HSBC IT was split into two parts - Development and Service Delivery [1]. A person doing an identical job in Service Delivery ( developing programmes, project managing, releasing software, you get the picture ) was paid less than in Development because salary surveys of the industry indicated that those in Service Delivery were paid less, so we were. And guess in which half I was located? My morale plummeted after that and I was gone within 9 months.

[0] Alcohol-free on site.
[1] Development concentrated solely on producing solutions for the business whereas Service Delivery concentrated on keeping the infrastructure intact and working. Of course in SD we still developed solutions but they were more concerned with increasing efficiency and performance, problem solving things that went wrong and releasing the solutions that Development produced. For a long while I was the Release Manager responsible for actually making the changes to the systems, releasing the programs and the testing to ensure that the release worked before making the systems available to the business [2]. I was also on the crash team, called together in the event of a major system failure. Did any of this work in my favour? Did it h*ll.

[2] Releases were always done at 02:00 on a Sunday morning, statistically, the quietest part of the working week as the systems would be unavailable for the period of release and testing. This is a 24x7 bank after all. And on my watch we NEVER had any major failures.

Still, it's difficult not to be bitter but I now view the past with a modicum of amusement.

P.S. I removed the actual name of the subsidiary just in case there are little bots searching for such and to avoid any legalities. Can't ever be too careful theses days!

[moonshadow]

A wish of luck and success has been rendered....

[FranTastic444]

Thanks Moon.

Sinned - I will message you with my HSBC / Midland related anecdote

[Sinned]

And I've PM'd you back. You have my permission to forward the PM to Carl, for one, as he may be interested in the technical aspects of my work experience there, if I haven't already detailed it in another thread.

[FranTastic444]

Thread resurrection time!

Reading Carl's Longest Journey post reminded me that I'd written of job dissatisfaction of my own some 3 years back. Here is an update (hope that nobody was holding their breath for a conclusion to this story )

Though I had various conversations with potential employment suitors, nothing came of it. Most wanted to employ me on a self-employed / consultancy basis. I've worked this way before (in the UK) but for it be viable you have to have confidence that they are going to send enough work your way and the day rate is good enough to cover off the times when you don't get work. Not the case here with the companies I was speaking to.

So I plodded on getting more and more disillusioned with the work I was doing. Things got so toxic with my micro-manager boss that we only communicated when we had to. She only used me for estimating work and there were large periods where I had no official work to do. Not being the sort who is happy to sit around doing nothing, I lent my services to the sales / presales team and helped out the support guys and then really got into helping out the account manager.

This last activity paid dividends when the guy I was working with was told to just concentrate on his European accounts and a new role was spooled up to look after the US accounts. I landed this job and, whilst it is far from perfect and I have a couple of concerns about how the role is progressing, I feel in a much better place than I was this time last year. I have the familiarity of the product and the customers, but I'm now sailing perilously close to being a salesman which puts me out of my comfort zone and forces me to learn new skills. This is exactly why I took on the role - I needed something to challenge me. I just hope that I can fake it until I make it

[crfriend]

That is excellent news, sir!

Whilst I was reading it, I was coming to the conclusion that you'd created a splendid opportunity, and when the time was right, make a lateral move and raise high the middle-finger at your old micro-manager.

I've had to do that a couple of times, most notably where I was in the 1990s when the Corporation hired a real idiot as CI0 (yes, that's a zero, and I used the notation liberally with very few recognising what was going on) and the environment went thoroughly toxic. I had a very good working relationship with a group in a functionally separate division where I'd occasionally helped out with some really knotty problems so I asked the division chief whether he needed another sysadmin. He jumped at the chance.

I put in my obligatory two week's notice, the CI0 called security to walk me out, and blew his top when they walked me upstairs to move into my new desk. Much to the amusement of my new boss, once in a great while I helped my pals on the old team with nasty bits -- but demanded a work-order number that I could charge the time to.

That lasted about two years until such time as the actions of the C-layer [1] types had hollowed the company and its assets out (a prototype Enron) and when the thing imploded, my division was sold off to a dot-com(ic) company in Colorado and we kept the lights on until early 2001 when that, too, came crashing down in the great Dot-Comic Bust.

It's truly astonishing how much damage one toxic manager can do to an otherwise healthy and fulfilling workplace.


[1] "Chief" or "Criminal"; take your pick.

[Coder]

A few years ago the director of my unit (at the time) retired and was replaced by a "businessman" who knew all about success, business, and wearing a suit. Couldn't stand the guy. He made inexplicable changes, fired "dead weight" (one of the people was in the hospital when he was trying to fire them, at least they had the decency to let that person recover a bit from major surgery), and was an all-around toxic person. I left that unit for the current department I'm working for, and am better off for it. He later left, but not after destroying a great community of people.

[crfriend]

He later left, but not after destroying a great community of people.

This is a common theme. These psychopaths (or sociopaths, take your pick) arrive, utterly destroy otherwise-functions parts of a company (or sometimes the entire thing), depart, and the scenario repeats at the next place they land, and the next, and the next.

Once in a while, one will injure someone with nothing left to lose and get terminated (in the Blade Runner style) and that'll break the cycle; however, in general, types like these are cancers that no cure exists for.

I would imagine that developed societies have found a way to deal with this sort of behaviour. The United States has not.