2x threatened w termination. I need helpI recently had a meeting with my boss and he reiterated what he told me two months ago: you lack knowledge, initiative and we don't think you care about your job. The truth is that I cannot disagree with my boss. I still ask my coworkers for help, I often don't go out of my way to ask my coworkers for work when I finish my own work, and the main reason I took my current job is because I wanted work experience. My boss was very generous and he told me that he would give me a couple of months to get up to speed and that if I didn't deliver the results he was looking for, he was going to have to let me go. Now I am in a position where I feel I should be proactive and start searching for a job while I have a job, because given my current skill set, anxiety level, and amount of enthusiasm for my current job, I believe it is imminent that I will be let go sooner rather than later. At the same time, I still remember the emotional pain I went through searching for a job while I was unemployed, and wouldn't want to tell my boss that I am looking for a new job because I'd probably be let go the same day (it's not like they need me, since I rarely have any work to do and when I ask my coworkers for work they rarely give me any). If it makes a difference, I currently work as an entry-level programmer and this is my first full-time job out of college. I need advice. Thank you.
Sigmas, Consider this a learning experience to apply to your next position. If your boss was as generous as you indicate in giving you this job, you should have taken advantage of every opportunity there. I don't know why your co-workers won't give you extra work unless your attitude (or some other circumstance..) turned them against you. In the interim I would suggest you take a hard look at your time on the job and honestly critique it so you can work to avoid the same mistakes at your next position. As far as job searching goes, do not mention anything to your boss whatsoever! If you think you would like to stay with this company you might want to meet again with your boss to see if you can correct the situation. That could mean a major change of attitude on your part toward the job and co-workers in general so they can see an effort on your part. Another thing to consider is that it wouldn't look too good on your resume to be fired from a job after two months - you did say you got this job for work experience? There are thousands visiting monster every day who would give their eye teeth to have your job, because some have been out of work for over a year. You should keep this in mind because although there are some GREAT companies out there, none are perfect. You've got some decisions to make and I hope for your sake you consider your next move very carefully. Well lacking knowledge is not that big of a deal, since you are young and inexperienced you are going to lack knowledge. The other two issues however, that you lack initiative and you don't care about your job both of which you said are true, those are huge deals. For starters I want to commend you for admitting that those really are true, most people aren't going to admit that. However now that you admit it to yourself you really need to examine those things. I have more than 20 years experience in IT and it appears to me from the little bit of info that you have provided that you have a pretty good deal there. You're not buried with work, so you actually have the time to learn and you have a boss who is providing what you admit is accurate feedback on your performance and he's also being patient and giving you the opportunity to prove to him that he should keep you. That combination that you have there is fairly rare. If you go to another place you aren't that likely to be walking into a better environment than the one you have right now. My concern for you is that you appear to have a pretty bad attitude about your job (lack of initiative, overall indifference) while you appear to have a pretty good entry level job, that's not a good combination. If you were overworked so you had no time to learn because you had to spend all of your time "cranking out production" you went to your boss and said "I know that I am supposed to be learning this other stuff but I don't have the time to learn it and do the work too" and he was a jerk about it and THEN you had a bad attitude about the job that would make more sense but clearly you aren't in that situation. You need to examine why you have no initiative and why you don’t really care about the job. Do you not want to be a programmer? Did you expect the workplace to be remarkably different than it is? Do you want to be back in school and not have a job? Did you breakup/move away from your boyfriend/girlfriend? The bottom line is that if you don’t care about your job, you’re not going to be there very long and you’re not going to be at the next job very long, or that one after that, or the one after that, or the one after that. You have to care about the job. You don’t have to care about the people there and you don’t have to care about the company but you do have to care about your own level of productivity and excellence. As far as my recommendations go… I totally agree with the first response to your post “As far as job searching goes, do not mention anything to your boss whatsoever!” I too think you should talk to you boss (since he seems to be willing to communicate with you and he is accurately assessing the situation) and ask him for his recommendations of how you can get up to the level of performance excellence that he needs to see from you. And if as a result of that conversation he appears to still be genuinely willing to work with you and give you a chance to achieve success there, then absolutely you should not look for another job at all and you should focus all of your attention and effort on learning and improving your performance there. The only reason to ever leave for another job is that it is reasonable to assume or statistically probable that the next job you get is going to be better than the one you currently have. If your boss is still willing to work with you, give you some more time and mentor you, then it is NOT at all probable that you would find yourself in a better situation if you left. It appears that your biggest problem at your current job is you, well if you go to another job you are going to be taking you with you. And you certainly appear to have both a better than average environment (level of work and opportunity to learn) and a better than average boss. From the information that you have provided there really isn’t much reason at all at this point to leave that job for another entry level programming job. I hope this helps. You are very fortunate to have an entry level. Most positions expect you to know everything and be proficient from the start on day one. Employers don't take time train anyone these days. Even when you tell them in the interview and being honest that your still a learner in some areas of Office 2007. Today's mangers are under termendous pressure from above. You will only hear a small part what is going on. You have to take the initiative to learn it yourself if nobody wnts to show you. Have books and manuals out to show that your trying to learn as fast as you can and be up to speed. I have taken some jobs where I didn't know that much, but studying on my own brought me up to speed instead of waiting to be trained.
Tough love, but I absolutely support the prior 3 responses. On the initiative front, when you approach your boss, you need to SHOW that you accept what he has said and you want to turn it around and that you appreciate his honesty. Then, talk about a corrective plan to get on course. That plan should have several categories and milestones: * Technical Knowledge: Will demonstrate knowledge of ____ by ___ * Initiative: * Work output; Ask what his recommendation is to obtain projects? Tell him that you are asking colleagues, but it isn't happening. So, what strategies can you employ? * Etc. Something like this would show more initiative than a vague promise to change and an open-ended question to your boss. Ian Christie Career Changers Coach Here are some practical suggestions to ascend the learning curve in the programming world.... You didn't say what kind of a programming job you have, database programming or GUI interface, PC based or midrange/mainframe programming so it's hard to talk specifics but I can give you some general thoughts that might be helpful to you. If it's PC based programming in a language that you took in college then review your text book (if you still have it); for any PC based programming language Borders or Barnes and Noble's is going to have a great book for it. Now whether you want to get the introductory version of the book or the advanced book is up to you and partly depends on what you took in college for this language and if you still have the book you used in college. The beauty of the books from the book stores (especially the advanced books) is that they come with CD's that have practice exams, programming assignments and perhaps most importantly a sample database. That sample database means that you can practice whatever you want, you can do the assignments they give you, but you can also try whatever else you want because you have a stable, available, well structured source of data to practice with. I've done a lot of different things in my 20 years in IT, working with hardware, Operating Systems, programming and a wide variety of applications and as a matter of routine I go and get a book that covers in great detail whatever the new thing is that I'm dealing with. If I got a job tomorrow and Access 2007 was the primary application I was going to be using, I'd be running out to the bookstore to get an Access 2007 book. It doesn't matter that I already have at home a 1300 page Access user/programming manual, it's not for Access 2007 so I would get another one. Not only does getting a book give you the best chance to quickly ascend the learning curve but it gives you the chance to learn/practice at home where you are probably going to be less stressed and more comfortable AND when you take the book with you back and forth to work it's demonstrating initiative (since you brought you own book) and effort (since you are taking it back and forth which presumably means you are using it at home as well). If your programming is not PC based but rather is Midrange/Main frame programming well then you have fewer options. You may or may not find a good book in COBOL or RPG or whatever you are programming in. I’d still look in the bookstore because you might. You might be able to get remote access to the company’s system from home but you might just have to put in extra hours at work so you can practice on your own time. At any rate here are the keys to programming in the “real world” which are probably very different than what you experienced in college. The #1 objective in programming in the real world is to “steal” code. This isn’t a bad thing in the business world this is the #1 objective. You find a program that already exists that is pretty close to the program that you need to produce, you make a copy of it, you strip out the things you don’t need and you write the code that you need to make it do what you want and you’re done. This is the foundation of programming in the real world, you start with some already written program that is basically what you need and you modify it, you look for “chunks of code” in other programs and copy and paste them into yours. Writing code from scratch is very inefficient and the objective is to do as little of that as possible. Key #2 learn the companies existing, or develop for yourself if they don’t have one, a very disciplined rigid detailed standard formatting structure for your programs. In a well run programming department there is one basic structure that everyone uses and this includes both the way the programs are assembled and the way they are documented. Good programmers document well and a good programming department REQUIRES that all changes to programs be documented (by whom, when, what the objective was, what the change was). This highly rigid detailed structure exists for four reasons. Speed – when you use the same structure over and over again you get faster and faster at writing code. Quality – when you use the same structure over and over again you minimize the opportunities for mistakes. Modifications – when you use the same (well documented) structure over and over again and when everyone uses the same structure, it’s easy to quickly figure out what the program is doing and everyone can easily modify their own and anyone else’s programs. “Stealing” code – when you use the same (well documented) structure over and over again and when everyone uses the same structure, then “stealing” code, which is the #1 objective in programming is quick and easy to do. Key #3 read lots of code. The fastest real world way to ascend the learning curve is to read lots of code. Ask your boss who writes the best programs, it might be your boss, it might be a current programmer it might be a programmer who wrote a lot of code but no longer works there. And then go read lots of programs that that person wrote. If they are well documented that’s a gold mine....[Message truncated]
I am miserable at my current job, it causes me anxiety, and I want a new job. Please help me come up with cunning ways to explain future interviewers why I want a new job.
I think it's safe to say that you aren't going to get much help in producing "cunning ways to explain future interviewers why I want a new job" in this thread. You stated your situation, people then invested time and effort in you to provide you with constructive criticism and positive suggestions on how to proceed and you blew everyone off and didn't acknowledge, appreciate or value what anyone had to say. And now you want more help from people? Good luck with that!
Thanks, Dave-in-NY Your right about bookstores like Borders. I am an Electronic Technician, lost some chances at jobs that required to reading code in C++ or other languages. Normally a technician doe not require programming. To test you need to read code. Although I don't have intention to be a programmer, you have to know code. Also, the public library is an excellent source of computer and technical books, which you don't have to buy right away if you need information. What job seekers need to know, sometimes your reading the book as your doing the work the first time. Its not like your going to perform brain surgery, but even the surgeon has to know the newest techniques by studying constantly and improving skills. What I learned most is you can't depend on anyone to train you, take the initaitive yourself. If you struggle then you will remember it longer instead of having it spoon fed. | |
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