A Fairly Major Life Change
So tomorrow I put in my two-week notice for my current agency. I work next week, which will be short due to the Labor Day holiday, and then the week after that I take my vacation.
After 13 years, I will be leaving my current job. I worked myself up into a management position and did a good job, I think. I saved the agency money several times, implemented a couple of money-saving programs that are still used today. I completed my master's degree at this institution. Got a promotion here. Introduced modern smartphones into the environment and did away with the old Blackberry devices. I managed a massive upgrade of server technology, .NET Framework technology, and SQL Server. I made a lot of friends and then saw some of them terminated, many moved on, and some are still stuck in what has become a terrible place to work.
I work in government. An election, especially a party change, means everything changes for you on the job. Not just the goals of the appointees, which corresponds to the goals of the governor, but as we learned two years ago, the respect or lack of respect towards the employees also changes. When an employer does not value you, because if you quit, they'll just find another guy that looks just like you, you can't feel appreciated. When you speak to the Secretary of your agency about "low morale" and he snickers and says, "Tell your guy to find another job", then I guess at least you know where the appointee stands.
What is really awkward and unfair is that these appointees come and go as the politicians change, and can also change in the middle of an administration, depending on if the appointee donated too little to a campaign, or if they said something in public that the governor didn't like. Or if someone else just got on the governor's good side. They come and go with no real repercussions, because rarely do one of these appointees actually have skill or knowledge of the agency over which he presides. In the case of my agency, a well-known football player was appointed to lead us. He picked his HR person, who in turn picked her IT person, who in turn replaced me as essentially the CIO of my agency. This IT appointee has never coded, obviously not run projects before (based on what I have seen in the last 8 months), and has no idea what I mean when I talk about basic Microsoft technology like WinForms versus WPF. It's all a mystery to him. He doesn't know how to support mobile phone technology, nor have any experience with any of the applications that we write. He doesn't know the servers that we use, or the tools, or even can remember the various production apps that our agency employees use daily. And why did this guy replace me again? If you ask him, he'll say he "applied" for the job. But he was the only "applicant" because they called him into a room and said, "Do you want to manage our IT?" That's it. He's not even an IT guy. Myself, and several other IT management that have been there for 13-22 years, were completely passed over without so much as asking us how we would like to fit into the new management team. So for now I sit in a cube, alongside other forgotten people, some of whom are looking for new jobs, and we're all feeling damn unappreciated.
What a disaster this has been.
With some fear, I admit, I am glad to be starting over somewhere new.
I am going to go to the beach and try to clean out some of this venom and negativity inside me before I start my new job. You can't carry around what I have in my head when starting a new position.
Goodbye, my work friends of the past 13 years. I will miss almost all of you, even thought I know you will not be reading this (because this page is mostly secret!).
...At least there will be no more worthless fucking CPMS meetings. Eight months of meetings so far with nothing to show for it. Just what I'd expect from appointee management.
After 13 years, I will be leaving my current job. I worked myself up into a management position and did a good job, I think. I saved the agency money several times, implemented a couple of money-saving programs that are still used today. I completed my master's degree at this institution. Got a promotion here. Introduced modern smartphones into the environment and did away with the old Blackberry devices. I managed a massive upgrade of server technology, .NET Framework technology, and SQL Server. I made a lot of friends and then saw some of them terminated, many moved on, and some are still stuck in what has become a terrible place to work.
I work in government. An election, especially a party change, means everything changes for you on the job. Not just the goals of the appointees, which corresponds to the goals of the governor, but as we learned two years ago, the respect or lack of respect towards the employees also changes. When an employer does not value you, because if you quit, they'll just find another guy that looks just like you, you can't feel appreciated. When you speak to the Secretary of your agency about "low morale" and he snickers and says, "Tell your guy to find another job", then I guess at least you know where the appointee stands.
What is really awkward and unfair is that these appointees come and go as the politicians change, and can also change in the middle of an administration, depending on if the appointee donated too little to a campaign, or if they said something in public that the governor didn't like. Or if someone else just got on the governor's good side. They come and go with no real repercussions, because rarely do one of these appointees actually have skill or knowledge of the agency over which he presides. In the case of my agency, a well-known football player was appointed to lead us. He picked his HR person, who in turn picked her IT person, who in turn replaced me as essentially the CIO of my agency. This IT appointee has never coded, obviously not run projects before (based on what I have seen in the last 8 months), and has no idea what I mean when I talk about basic Microsoft technology like WinForms versus WPF. It's all a mystery to him. He doesn't know how to support mobile phone technology, nor have any experience with any of the applications that we write. He doesn't know the servers that we use, or the tools, or even can remember the various production apps that our agency employees use daily. And why did this guy replace me again? If you ask him, he'll say he "applied" for the job. But he was the only "applicant" because they called him into a room and said, "Do you want to manage our IT?" That's it. He's not even an IT guy. Myself, and several other IT management that have been there for 13-22 years, were completely passed over without so much as asking us how we would like to fit into the new management team. So for now I sit in a cube, alongside other forgotten people, some of whom are looking for new jobs, and we're all feeling damn unappreciated.
What a disaster this has been.
With some fear, I admit, I am glad to be starting over somewhere new.
I am going to go to the beach and try to clean out some of this venom and negativity inside me before I start my new job. You can't carry around what I have in my head when starting a new position.
Goodbye, my work friends of the past 13 years. I will miss almost all of you, even thought I know you will not be reading this (because this page is mostly secret!).
...At least there will be no more worthless fucking CPMS meetings. Eight months of meetings so far with nothing to show for it. Just what I'd expect from appointee management.
Comments
Post a Comment