How is your career going?

[dbt1949]

Start your own business.

[AWS260]

I know enough people who have started their own businesses to know with 100% certainty that I do not have what it takes to start my own business.

[Smoove_B]

I had two people over the weekend try to steer me into consulting work, but I'm not sure I'm cut out for it - the sales part mainly (to get started). I think I could go to work for someone that was in a consulting business, but the idea of trying to start one up just seems like something I'd regret immediately.

But I can understand the draw, for sure.

As it turns out I'm going to be applying for a job with the state. I don't have any realistic hopes it'll work out, but I can at least cross that off my bucket list. It's the first time in 25+ years I've seen a job with the state that is (1) local and (2) in my wheelhouse. I guess we'll see.

[Skinypupy]

One post-mortem on this week's purge. I received an IM yesterday from the VP who axed everyone saying (paraphrasing): "I know this week was difficult, but we're glad you're still here with us. Looking forward to moving forward in this new reality with you...etc, etc." I thought it was a thoughtful gesture...until I talked to my colleagues and found out she sent the exact same boilerplate IM to every remaining salesperson in the company.

Doesn't do much to change my opinion that we have turned in to a soulless corporate machine.

I know enough people who have started their own businesses to know with 100% certainty that I do not have what it takes to start my own business.

Same

[Zaxxon]

Yikes. Did they really think no one would talk to each other?

[Isgrimnur]

For me, it's not even about being cut out for running my own business. I just straight don't want to.

[LordMortis]

I thought about it in my early 20s. I no longer have the temperament for it.

WRT the IM. If it was a blast that told everyone as a group how much they were appreciated, it would be fine. One to one, if making it seem like a personalized message when it's not. Not so much. I'd have to see the actual text and presentation to see how I'd actually feel. Generally speaking, I seem pretty much most company business as soulless, though. That came over the years of working with soulless businesses in every situation except for family owned businesses. Which both cared and ground you underfoot at the same time.

[Kraken]

My annual NVIDIA gig started up again yesterday. Ten sessions down, 990 to go.

[coopasonic]

I get that this is business, but it's unlike anything this company has ever done. It's the 100% opposite of what our corporate culture has been ever since I've been here. I was planning on riding things out at least through this year, but may be rethinking that plan after watching this very soulless purge today.

In the past two years my employer's culture, in particular with regard to IT staff, has shifted significantly. I've worked here for 22 years, won the company's top award multiple times and I no longer feel any kind of job security. The CIO of our division came from amazon and is trying to turn us into amazon. On the plus side, my pay is really nice. I fear the pay cut I will take if I end up going elsewhere. Assuming I can find work elsewhere.

On the plus side, I am actually enjoying the work again after giving up people management.

[Paingod]

My best team member is a yard from the finish line on a job offer and there's no way we can match/exceed whatever the offer may be. It's a union shop, so we're constrained by the contract. When he leaves, his workload is largely automated and run on his own custom scripted events with 450+ custom SQL queries he uses to pull together whatever anyone wants in record time. I expect it will degrade quickly over time and become largely inert within a month or so.

The urgency on finding a new job has skipped a notch and I'm applying to anything in my desired salary band with a title that's at least where I was a couple years ago. I need to get out as soon as possible. I fully expect my idiot boss to be angry that I can't fill in a specialized role that uses python, a half dozen different tools, a massive library of custom and mostly undocumented queries, and a hundred different user sheets that are used to automatically display and shuffle data as needed.

As an analogy, this employee I have came in to drive a car. He gutted the car and rebuilt it to make it drive faster than anyone knew it could and run more efficiently than we ever dreamed. Problem is, you've got to be a skilled mechanic to keep the car moving forward. If you just know how to drive a car, it's going to stall.

None of that was in my repertoire when they hired me. It's not in my repertoire now. My boss doesn't know my direct report is about to give his notice, but he's been trying to pressure me to "be his backup" by "looking over his shoulder" when it would take literal months to understand just the data architecture in the database and make any use of it in a meaningful way. I'm a jack of all trades. This job requires a specialist. I can't just shoehorn myself in like that. It's not an interchangeable thing. It's literally something where if you don't do it on a daily basis, you're not doing it.

Worst case scenario is that my boss gets all pissy and pushes me hard enough that he ends up figuring out just how many fucks I don't have left to give. Best case is I get out of here quickly.

I've whipped off 3-4 resumes to jobs in the last week, but haven't gotten anything more than automated messages back. It's a tight job market.

[em2nought]

Running my own businesses was ok, but a partnership was hell. I'd rather die before I'd get involved in another partnership.

[Carpet_pissr]

Not a career, really, but I just started at Trader Joe's yesterday. Anyone else here ever worked there?

[hentzau]

Running a 101 degree temp and got dragged into an outage call because our team is so thin that the other engineer on our team is out of town and can't join.

I love my job.

[LawBeefaroni]

Strange retirement this week of one of our SVPs. I don't report to him directly but I work closely with his team. Out of the blue and effective at the end of the year.

He can certainly retire comfortably so more power to him but he's well under 60 and took the foundational role just a few years ago.

[Paingod]

I've got the first of however many interviews with a local bank next Wednesday for a "Vice President of Information Technology" role.

I checked out their employee roster. "Vice President" is how they say "Manager" - but it would likely be a 30% raise over what I make now if their posted salary range is accurate.

Honestly, not excited to work for a bank but I've got to get out from under the GM here. The people I work with are awesome. The business is respectable. The mission is worthwhile. My boss is just a toolbag and it hurts every day when I watch him break everything here, knowing the Board chose him as having "more experience" than I did.

[Montag]

I've got the first of however many interviews with a local bank next Wednesday for a "Vice President of Information Technology" role.

I checked out their employee roster. "Vice President" is how they say "Manager" - but it would likely be a 30% raise over what I make now if their posted salary range is accurate.

Honestly, not excited to work for a bank but I've got to get out from under the GM here. The people I work with are awesome. The business is respectable. The mission is worthwhile. My boss is just a toolbag and it hurts every day when I watch him break everything here, knowing the Board chose him as having "more experience" than I did.

I would think the Bank would take IT extremely seriously these days and it would be given the proper respect.

[RMC]

I've got the first of however many interviews with a local bank next Wednesday for a "Vice President of Information Technology" role.

I checked out their employee roster. "Vice President" is how they say "Manager" - but it would likely be a 30% raise over what I make now if their posted salary range is accurate.

Honestly, not excited to work for a bank but I've got to get out from under the GM here. The people I work with are awesome. The business is respectable. The mission is worthwhile. My boss is just a toolbag and it hurts every day when I watch him break everything here, knowing the Board chose him as having "more experience" than I did.

When I worked in banking, IT was handled with a ton of security. We had on call that required you to dial in using a modem(yes I am old), and it would call you back at the number that you had programmed in. There was also a code to type in. So everything was top of the line 20+ years ago. But it was nice to work in IT at a bank. Lots of extra holidays, and usually a nice environment to work in. I am sure it has gotten better over the years, since IT has only gotten more complex.

[Paingod]

I would think the Bank would take IT extremely seriously these days and it would be given the proper respect.

...But it was nice to work in IT at a bank. Lots of extra holidays, and usually a nice environment to work in. I am sure it has gotten better over the years, since IT has only gotten more complex.

Both of those are heartening comments to hear. I suspect that a bank may be one of the first places where I don't get a mountain of pushback when I ask for security measures. At least, I'd hope so. I can't get the retail store I work for to approve spending for a proper backup scheme; it's "an acceptable risk" to just have online backups of our data (not images of the servers) according to those who approve spending.

[hitbyambulance]

after exactly 12 months (!!) of unemployment, i am starting a new job on Monday. good news: this is through a contract agency for the largest computer company on planet earth. bad news: somehow they deign to pay me 40% less than what i was making at my last job >:{

[YellowKing]

Not a career update for me, but for my wife. She has worked as a data manager for various elementary schools for the past 18 years. Last week she got hired in the same position at a middle school. While it's purely a lateral move (same position within the county, no pay increase), the middle school is literally right across the street within walking distance of our house!

Needless to say, she's excited about the drastically shorter commute, and the change from elementary to middle school. She found out from her current boss that she beat out 29 other applicants for the position so I'm super proud of her.

[Isgrimnur]

Congrats on both accounts!

[Jeff V]

Again, this is about my wife, as I no longer have a career to speak of.

She does what she does (nurse at a nursing home) very well. She has an LPN license, and she is essentially assistant director where she is, with the promise of promotion to director if she gets her RN (she's working on getting into a bridge program that would expedite this). She makes more than the RNs in her organization, and was told she's at the very top of scale as to what she can be paid without an RN.

When they put her into management, I was under the impression she was given a choice between remaining hourly and going salary. Salary didn't pay anymore, but they told her the hours would be more flexible and she could get comp time for any OT worked. Despite my reservations, she decided she liked the promise of net-40 hour weeks and took salary. Of course, she's working crazy OT and hardly ever has a chance to take off early, much less days off.

Now a friend is trying to recruit her at a place she works. It would be hourly, 1.5x over 8 hours per shift. It seems she could work all of the OT she wants -- but the pay cut would be along the lines of $11 per hour, so she'd need to work about 12 hours OT per week. It's not management, it would be a big step backwards career wise but she doesn't care - she said she'd be attending only 13 patients and it would be a vastly easier job. 20% pay cut and loss of management status.

But she's BTDT before. When the work is too easy, she gets bored. This is night shift, her current job, after 12 years of 2nd and 3rd shift, is day shift, no weekends, holidays off. She'd be back to a shift that does not allow her to participate fully in the raising of our kids, and the requirement to work weekends means she's going to miss their tournaments and recitals. I believe that will make her more despondent and she'll become more depressed and further beg to move us to the Philippines, something I don't want to do until the kids are done with high school (daughter is in 2nd grade).

This other job would be in Aurora, 30 minutes less commute each way and while she's not seen the numbers, allegedly has good healthcare. Other benefits are similar to her current job, 401k matching and tuition reimbursement. The one problem I have is the salary...throughout her career, she's worked at places that downsized her schedule due to low census (this is a rehab center, more prone to that compared to where she is now, a place with permanent residents). It's also not uncommon for her employers to place moratoriums on OT, and should that happen, the 20% pay cut could be disastrous.

Since she makes the money, I only have so much influence on her decisions. She's a good manager, I always thought she would be. In time, she would find ways to make her job easier -- I did so in every management job I've had. I hope she sticks with it, but she is really dissatisfied when she's on call (like this weekend). She told me to wake her if I hear her phone chime...I had to do so 4 times while writing this post. (the drugs I had to take post-surgery have kept me awake 5 days straight now, so she knows I'll hear the phone). My career was predicated on always moving forward, never back, and this worked out until Covid. I just don't really understand her willingness to step back, which for me would have been something nearly impossible to recover from.

[Skinypupy]

As part of our recent restructure, we've brought in lots of people from outside the company to be in leadership, sales, and content development roles. Most of them are coming in from tech (i.e. LinkedIn, Salesforce, Clari, etc.).

When looking at their LinkedIn pages, I have been absolutely shocked at the sheer number of different companies these people have worked for. Of the last dozen people we've hired, they average working at seven different companies over the past 15 years. That's moving to another job around every two years. I do acknowledge that I'm an extreme outlier, having been with my current company for almost 20 years now and 8 years at my previous job. I only have two companies on my resume in the past 28 years.

Curious what an "average" would be to stay with a job, as hopping companies every year or two seems absolutely nuts (not to mention exhausting) to me. Do they start looking for the next job the minute they sit in their new seat, or do they give it 30 days before shooting out updated resumes?

The CIO of our division came from amazon and is trying to turn us into amazon.

This has become our running joke as well. Nearly every leader we've hired has been from either LinkedIn or Clari (a terrible AI sales assistant). We are no longer the company many of us got hired for and are slowly (or not so slowly, in some cases) morphing into something completely different. Time will tell if that's successful, or if we're just another 2-year stint on these people's resumes. If I had to bet, I'd put money on the latter right now.

They also announced the new comp plans last week. It'll remain mostly the same in terms of expected comp for the year, but they changed the structure so that now we get half of our commission amount until we reach 50% of our goal, and then 1.5X commission after we reach that threshold. I understand the intent (pressurize everyone to start quickly and get to 50% as soon as possible) but it also means that we're now all taking a 50% cut in our commissions for the first six months of the year...with the hope that we can then turn around and make it up on the back end.

Needless to say, people are not exactly thrilled with this. Doubly so since they also announced that our Q1 (Aug-Nov) doesn't count towards the yearly quota in this new structure and our quote basically "resets" on December 1. That's probably fine for those who have evenly spaced revenue throughout the year, but Q1 is - by far - my largest quarter. So I'm going to be stuck in the 50% purgatory for longer than most this year.

Not a career update for me, but for my wife. She has worked as a data manager for various elementary schools for the past 18 years. Last week she got hired in the same position at a middle school. While it's purely a lateral move (same position within the county, no pay increase), the middle school is literally right across the street within walking distance of our house!

Needless to say, she's excited about the drastically shorter commute, and the change from elementary to middle school. She found out from her current boss that she beat out 29 other applicants for the position so I'm super proud of her.

That's awesome news. Congrats to her!

[hitbyambulance]

i believe i would be perfectly happy to never work as a vendor at a MANGA company again. you are 'technically' working for your vendor, but that is a convenient legal fiction for liability as you are essentially an employee of the client company, and expected to kowtow to the client unquestioningly - and here, even submit to annual reviews! - without most of the benefits (and quite a few added penalties and restrictions) of being an "HR-enabled" actual employee there at significantly lowered and artificially depressed wages. oh and you are supposed to act like you're lucky to be there on top of that - i actually had this incident occur in my first week.

[gbasden]

Curious what an "average" would be to stay with a job, as hopping companies every year or two seems absolutely nuts (not to mention exhausting) to me. Do they start looking for the next job the minute they sit in their new seat, or do they give it 30 days before shooting out updated resumes?

For me while moving up in the tech field starting in the early 90s, my average was about a year and a half at a company. You would get hired to do something project related, complete that project, then use the skills you gained to land the next role. I had eleven jobs on my resume when I joined my current company, and I've been here for almost 17 years on the same team.

[Paingod]

I flew through the first interview with the bank and got called back for a second interview 3 hours later. I felt like that was a stellar success; it lasted over an hour and was with the HR person and the person I'd report to.

The second interview yesterday was more of a B- performance on my part. I have no one to blame but my own overexcited brain depriving me of sleep the night before and exhaustion from a full day of work before going in. This meeting was with the CEO, current VP of IT, and my potential boss again.

The CEO and VP of IT had about 6 questions in total between them so the interview ended up being just 45 minutes, which doesn't feel like a solid "I stuck the landing" timeline. I staggered over a couple of questions I had easy answers for in the previous interview because my focus was strung out, but it didn't feel like a disaster.

I should know by the end of the week if I'm the new VP of IT or if I get to keep looking.

The current VP of IT is a hardcore, old school nerd. That's not a bad thing, but he was absolutely rocking the sweater vest, pocket protector, and glasses look. He's been in banking IT for over 30 years. His primary concern about me was my lack of knowledge around banking regulations, to which I cited my adaptation to things like becoming a HIPAA Compliance Officer at a previous job and running our PCI Compliance at the retail store now.

What I found interesting is that the bank is basically an IT shell. Desktop machines and a small network, reaching out to a 3rd party service that hosts and runs the entire business structure offsite. I didn't say anything, but I seriously wondered why they had 3 people in IT for that.

[Isgrimnur]

Do you expect the business people to talk to the IT vendors?

[Paingod]

I'm in!

I'm waiting for the offer letter and sign-off on a background check, but they called and said I had it. They even decided to roll up their single person running Facilities under me because I have a background in that as well, which was not part of the job but is a 'value add' to me coming in.

I should be starting December 9th, as long as my background check doesn't get confused with someone else that has my name.

I've basically got 30 days working alongside the existing VP of IT for a full knowledge transfer before he leaves in early January.

[Skinypupy]

Congrats!

[Smoove_B]

Have my second interview with the State next week; it looks like this is going to be an actual thing. Given the current timeline this will either be a really good or really bad decision on my part.

(yes I'm being intentionally general and non-specific)

[The Meal]

Congrats Paingod and best luck Smoove_B

[Zenn7]

Congrats on the shorter commute Mrs. YK.
Congrats on the new job PG - what was your bank again? Can you help me with a loan? :p

G'luck Smoove!

JeffV - g'luck with whatever your wife decides. Your life always sounds like a painful mess to me.

On job hopping/duration: 5 years in first company (promoted twice, side position and then a 3rd promotion - all IT, none management).
24.5 years in current job - same basic job but promoted from level 1 to level 2 to senior to lead dev now.

Job hopping is good for different experiences and more money. Staying in one job is good for really learning stuff (I know core stuff about our systems that have been migrated off mainframe since I started that no one else knows or is likely to ever learn given the evolution of the workflow).