I've always believed that the work you do should matter to
you. If you're just plodding along day
after day counting the hours till the weekend then frankly you're just wasting
your and everyone else's time.
I know it's not always possible to "follow your
bliss" but life's too short to only enjoy the weekends.
After over 20 years in the field I've come to the
realization that the closest I can come to cubicle dwelling bliss is to either
run the IT department or just blithely take my marching orders at its lowest
rung.
Anything else just has me spinning my wheels.
So while my credentials include jobs in system
administration, support and project
management not to mention creating a successful IT consulting business, my
dreams of sitting in the big chair are about as likely as a winning lottery
ticket.
So as I scan the job boards and the occasional craigslist
posting I keep a vigilant eye open for positions that match the other end of my
proposed bliss...
I had thought I found one the other day. It was a support job that was described as
being part roving admin and part helpdesk.
The nice part was that if I had to go
anywhere the company provided the transportation.
It seemed perfect.
The pay rate was a little low but if I wasn't shouldering the cost of
transportation that was a leg up on anything else I'd seen.
My application had apparently impressed the hiring manager
enough for him to schedule a short phone screen.
In the course of the subsequent conversation the manager
told me that the job would involve around 80 hours per week at all hours. The prospective employee was expected to be
available round the clock 24/7/365 and work from the office, home and wherever
else he/she was required.
Believe it or not I was still considering the position even
after I did the math and figured out that I would be making $9.61 per hour
before taxes.
But that wasn't what really turned me off to the job.
It was the realization during the Q & A part of the
interview that this company, like many others, was built on making bad
decisions.
Decisions like:
- Attempted "Cleaning" of rootkit, malware and virus infections off of PC's instead of reloading from a backup image.
- Not providing adequate training to your technicians
- Not staying current with technical advances
- Supporting 20 year old servers with no hope of replacement parts
- Installing software that was no longer being supported by the manufacturer
- Not informing the client as to best practices or upgrade options
- Accepting liability for an SLA at a client where meeting that SLA is impossible due to the previously mentioned reasons.
It all amounts to billing for work that isn't really being
done and I have a problem with that.
IT is an uphill battle and if you're not moving forward it
won't be long till you're moving the other direction. It seems that most of the major players
disagree, however, as they've built their IT support businesses off of doing
what amounts to little more than "busywork"
It's one of the reasons I don't make the money in consulting
that many think I should be. I like to
fix the problem once and move on from there.
I'm not one to keep beating a dead horse.
The client is the boss but I'm being paid to
know things they don't. That's a level
of trust that I refuse to betray. That
means that sometimes you have to have an uncomfortable conversation but I'd
rather lose a client that wants me to do shoddy work than continue on and
sacrifice my own integrity.
We're getting back to my original assertion that your work
life should be meaningful and anything less is just a waste of time.
Making money off not doing the job your clients are trusting
you to do is the ultimate expression of that and I can't stomach it.
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