In need of a little direction at least.Hi all.. It's been a bit since I've posted, but the reason for that was because after I posted here, through some strange miracle, I found a job in my field with a stable company as a contract to hire. That's the good part. Now here is the catch. I am not happy, and for good reason. The job itself was somewhat misrepresented to me in that certain technologies that were required for me to know are not being utilized as I thought. The person who I replaced was using a more recent programming environment but writing legacy code. The people who make the decisions are not developers, but network people, and they work on a different platform than I do. I am the only Windows developer at this place. There is maybe one other developer in the company, which blows my mind for a global enterprise as the one I work for. There are some things that I know for fact are shoddy, and I've told them that they need to rewrite certain things as they were never done right to begin with, hence many of the problems they have. The solution according to one of my supervisors is the quick fix. The quick fix doesn't work, and it ends up costing more money, and I've demonstrated that, and they still don't care. I have 4 or more major projects that need to be done on top of everything else. I can't do them all, and I have someone who is half salesman and half IT director. It doesn't work, and this person likes to make promises to people that he himself can't deliver, and doesn't understand why things take more time than the thinks. The other day when I went to work, at 8AM, I needed a tranquilizer to get me halfway through lunch, by which time I was ready for #2 but said to myself, no. What should have taken 2 hours or less took me 3 days largely because what I have to work with is so malformed, nothing is simple. Looking elsewhere is a simple solution while I work. Here is what scares me. In the past, employers have been reluctant to hire me because I've never stayed at a place for any length of time. That's because everywhere I worked for had some financial issue or they were going under, or about to go under. After that, I got laid off after 9/11, I was sick, family stuff, the whole enchilada. I am 3 months into this contract to hire position, and despite the stability, this place technologically is worse than any startup I've ever worked for. I am nearing my wits end, and I am by no means happy with the location either as after work and on weekends, there is no recreation. Aside from the major employment gap, I've got a solid work history for almost a year now over 2 places. One of which I was working for part time while going to school full time. I left them and then I went to work full time on a contract to hire. Actually I left the other place because I wasn't getting paid in a timely manner. Luckily I found something local, and here I am. Do I just plainly state that my current job is literally driving me insane and was partially misrepresented, hence my looking or stick it out for a few more months till the contract is done with or what? I get up. I go to work with a long commute. They want overtime, and I am burning out. I come home for part 2 of this long commute. There is nothing to do after work to unwind, and there is nothing to do on weekends. I simply rack my brains out over something that is royally flawed for a place that has seemingly no interest in making it right and making it my headache to fix and my emergency. I also get handed these things at nearly the very last minute (literally). I have no issue with the agency who placed me with this client. It's the way this client works that I have an issue with. I also have some concerns about going perm based on what I am seeing and what others who started on contract who went perm have told me. How do you explain to a potential employer or consulting agency, you're looking for another job because the place literally is driving you insane? It's so bad, when I spoke to the agency I work for now, the recruiter told me point blank that they didn't blame me on bit if I wanted to quit based on what I told them. What do I do without shooting myself in the foot in the name of self preservation? I think this isn't about the job, this is about you. The things that you describe are normal everyday business and that shouldn't be stressing you out enough to have you taking two tranquilizers a day (yes, I know you didn't take the second one). When you add that to your history of job hopping, I think it comes down to you. You must have a doctor on the other end of those tranquilizers, ask them for a referral to a therapist and discuss the whole set up. You may not be properly medicated, you might have depression or ADHD or a combo of things. You may need some behavioral assistance in how to cope at work and some perspective on what's reasonable and normal and what isn't. I'd take care of all that before you start changing jobs again. Tess Tess, Let me clarify some things here before you start diagnosing me with various things. 1. I don't go job hopping. When you work for a company that does not have a sound and solid business model, and they are in financial trouble, and you continually run into that situation because all it boils down to is startups, so you levae the company for a more stable job or the company folds up, how is that about me? I wanted to point that out first. 2. I have NEVER had a job where I felt the need for these things till I worked for this place. So you understand, when I say I have major projects in the pipe, these are things that take a good solid devoted month to do properly without interuption. One person can't physically do 3 major projects at once in a given time frame that someone wants. Let me give you another example of what you consider to be normal and I tell you from experience that this is not normal. My immediate supervisors boss comes to me asking for some data to give to a partner of the company's. He has this quick fix solution in his head (as if he himself did it on another platform, and niether of which is the case). He has a meeting to go to in an hour, and he figures in 2 hours this should be done. It should have take far less than that had the database been written correctly the first time. That isn't the case. It took me close to 3 days with overtime to do the job because someone who is not a developer or architect wrote the thing, and it was never implemented correctly then. In the meantime, they are griping over it's going to take me another 2 weeks to get another major project done, and I get pulled off that to work on this other antiquiated thing that I told them repeatedly needs to be rewritten as it's fundamentally flawed and outdated. The project I got pulled from is something that people in Japan are now starting to gripe about because they wanted it before I ever started the place. The guy they had doing the work wasn't worth 2 cents, which is why he's not there anymore. They feel that 2 weeks is too long for me to finish an enterprise class application that is critical to supporting things with existing production units, and it has to be done a certain way. Someone else is about to get fired over it when it's not even their fault. These people have some unrealistic time frames, and they insist on putting add ons with legacy technology that has issues of it's own on top of something that is fundamentally flawed to where it costs more than it should to implement, and it's still not right. This place wants too many things and doesn't always give me the tools I need to make them right, and some of what they want that needs to be done, they refuse to allow me the time to make it right so I can give them what they want. They tell me about major flaws literally right before someone gets on a plane to train someone on this software, and right before they start, I may or may not have something finished. This is normal to expect someone to work on software in production and develop against it? At the literally last minute? Now, for this I have all these things you mentioned and I need therapy for this? What I need is some manpower that they won't offer like anyone else in the company because they are that cheap for one. Secondly, I need some lattitude to do what I know is right to prevent these things from happening again. It appears to me that they would rather have something that creates problems as opposed to addressing them before they become major issues that inhibit the company from doing business. Is it also normal for a company to chastize their employees for asking questions about what it is they are looking at so they know what it is they are fixing so that they can understand the problem first before figuring out a solution? I have been chastized more than once for trying to ask for clarification on something so I have the understanding I need to take care of something. I've never EVER had a job where I was not allowed to ask someone a question to clarify something. If you want to lay out why you have no responsibility for any of this, feel free. Frankly, I didn't read past your first few sentences. If you want to get yourself into more stable employment then you need to look at yourself and find out why you don't choose wisely and why you have some sort of problem everywhere you go. Your choice. Tess | |
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