Seven Years

“Oh, you hate your job?  Why didn’t you say so?  There’s a support group for that.  It’s called everybody, and they meet at the bar.”

-Drew Carey (not George Carlin as the internet would have you believe)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ph9I-qPQ6FU

Seven years ago today I drove to a spot just south of the airport; a small swath of land still considered city of Atlanta nestled between the airport and Riverdale.  I drove up to what looked like an old, abandoned warehouse in an industrial area to start a new job.  There I left behind the life of a contractor and returned to the life of a full time employee.

Here I sit, seven years later to the day, now in an office in a downtown high-rise, and I’m still waiting for that first promotion.  What am I still doing here?

There was an opportunity to get the word senior prepended to my title once, but one of the prerequisites was that I successfully complete a project as the technical lead.  I was eventually given that opportunity but, unfortunately, the project I was given to complete was the Kobayashi Maru. 

For those who don’t get the reference, Kobayashi Maru is a Star Trek reference: a test given to Starfleet cadets that is unbeatable, unsolvable, a no-win scenario.

So, the Kobayashi Maru cost me ten months of my life that I’ll never get back: days, nights, and weekends.  There was plenty of money blown on the uncompletable project as well.  It is because of experiences like this that I have to wonder if any of the conservatives who parrot the line about private businesses being more efficient than the government have ever actually worked for a private business or been privy to the amount of waste, the number of poor decisions, and the disorganized and ineffective processes implemented in the private sector.  This project was the main reason why there was a sixteen-month span that I didn’t get to take a vacation, and lost those paid vacation days without compensation.

There will be more opportunities to lead projects in the future but the fact that the two new developers who were just hired here were hired as senior developers makes me a bit skeptical about my prospects for advancement here.

When I started working professionally, the older generation criticized my generation for a lack of company loyalty.  We were criticized for job jumping instead of sticking at one place for a long time.  But what my generation has discovered is that company loyalty will get you nothing.  It benefits the company, not you.  In order to get the raises or advancements you deserve, you have to move from company to company, achieving those goals through interviews and salary negotiations.  You don’t advance through hard work or sacrifice.  Your current company is happy to keep you in your current position, giving you meager, incremental raises every year, and squeezing as much productivity from you as they can.

So, as I sit here blogging about it rather than debugging restful services I have to ask myself.  Why am I still here?

Tomorrow we, as a company, are going to an afternoon barbecue at Piedmont Park.  At some point I am going to slip away and go get a drink at the Highlander.  I’ll be meeting the support group at the bar.