Caltrops - Still Life - I miss Fatbabies

Forum Overview :: Still Life

by jeep 05/30/2005, 12:21pm PDT

I used to go in there and read stuff like this to remind myself that no matter how much I hate biomedical research, I have a good job and I work for great people.

The (minor) drawbacks to my job are that the dev team is hopelessly backwards, they tackle 10-year old technology with a zest only government employees could muster. Seriously, it took me three tries to get those old posts back up, the links still don't work right, and I'm the fucking technology expert at the company. Many conversations start and end thus:

jeep: "Your giant web application should probably use CSS for the frontend so you don't have to personally style every pixel of every page by hand. Also, stop forcing the users to interact with your programs via numpad, their laptops don't have them."

mgmt: "That's not how we do things here, part of the fun of the job for our developers is writing the entire monolothic application from the ground up. Also, we're not taking user interface advice from the hardware guy."

So when we're talking about UI I'm just the hardware guy, when we're talking about databases I'm just the network guy, when we're talking about project management and good programming practice I'm just a tech.

See? Minor.

My more serious complaints are always about the managment of other departments, how they treat their employees, etc. Oh, and the middle management in general is completely spineless, which makes me look like a rabble rouser everytime I get tangled up in someone else's problems. How many companies have 500 employees and one human resources person, who has like 3 other job descriptions that come first? How many of those companies have the computer guy report sexual harassment issues that don't concern him directly to said VP, because she would never find out otherwise?

My contention is that if people can't do the right thing by their employees, they are not fit to manage them. I've worked at plenty of companies, I know how rare it is for people to treat each other well, but it isn't idealistic to demand it out of them. I've worked here for 7 years now and it's been the same, some managers can do it, the rest can fucking leave as far as I'm concerned. Every time I see something wrong I have to go to the Director/Chariman/CEO/etc, interrupt their meeting with the board, and then in front of all of them, bet my job that it's worth his time to fix the problem, and for 7 years I've been right every time.

I guess this job turned out to be, in the end, what I made it. I never had a job description, so here's what I do: I make the network go, and I build hardware and software to make things easier. I help the good employees, I outlast the bad ones. I am not well-liked here, which makes a lot of sense since I'm a complete nuisance to the people who mistreat their employees and a partial nuisance to the ones who bury their heads and try to ignore what goes on around them. I've got no authority and no responsibility that isn't derived from my own intellect and ethics. I don't think anyone else in the world has a job like mine, though I suspect most get paid better.

I'm constantly looking at other jobs, wishing I could just go and see what it was like for a bit, but I expect I'll never find anything better. I don't know what it's like to have a job description, I don't know what it's like to leave work at the office, I've never taken a vacation, and even the jobs I look at elsewhere are just like this one in a lot of ways: vague descriptions, amorphous responsibilities, demanding environments, requiring skills I picked up at some point as hobbies.

So my epitaph as of now reads:

Here Lies jeep, Not Quite 30, More Skill than Sense. Too Useful to Fire, Too Broke to Quit, Too tired To Move, Too Bored to Sit.

/jeep/
...Ugh, now I need one of those Futurama suicide booths.