Work

or… How do I always manage to be the employee that does his job, works hard, keeps abreast of business and technology, steps up to manage projects and architect solutions, yet still not be the employee that is a) given the position with responsibility. b) Treated like he knows anything at all about 1-the business, and 2-The technology.

The answer is I don’t know. Believe me, if I did know, I’d stop doing whatever I am doing that puts me in that position. You think I like this?

I like the place I work. It’s largely evil, and only cares about money, not people (customers or employees), but the people are (mostly) good, They know their stuff, and the money is not too bad. That said. I’ve been overlooked recently in favor of other employees that, while not incompetent by any stretch, know a fraction of what I do, as far as the company and it’s people, and the applications we support.

My team has two System Architects… one of which can’t architect a thing. One manages to take a single project and “architect” it into a ginormous project that only he can work on, excluding all else. THe other does about as much architecting as I do flipping hamburgers at McDonalds.

And here I am, wanted to get into the architecture field, having the knowledge of our systems, having good relationships with people on all teams, having a reputation as a developer who can deliver and make the customer happy. And I get the run around. I get, “It’s 50% trainging and 50% experience” fuck that! I have the experience. We’ve got architects at our company that weren’t any good at coding, yet I’m not qualified? WTF

Then I talk to a good friend of mine at another company. Same business. He’s got a web architect, who doesn’t want to use Flash because it will lock them into a single technology, but some, no name .NET component that sucks for UI, that’s a great choice. It makes my head hurt that this bozo is doing the job I want, and sounds like he couldn’t program or architect his way out of a paper sack!!!

For Crying out loud!

Some days I just want to punch, kick, or strangle someone. Today it was one of our “senior engineer” fellas. Now on a normal day I like him a lot. He knows his shit. Today though he honestly tried to tell me how to set up a ColdFusion server. I’ve installed and set up CF more times than him I can guarantee, and on top of that I know what I’m doing. For him it’s just an install.

I was flabbergasted, he suggested I google the topic. FUCK THAT. You google it. I know what I’m talking about.

Lately I have that spider sense tingle that life here is on a slow boat to no where. Career advancement… Ah to have that would be nice.

Among the weirdos I work with, several stick out as extra special weird. SK is one of them. I am fortunate enough to not be on many projects with him. He’s a PM, and I’ve dodged that bullet so far. However he comes around often enough looking for co-workers in my row. Twice now he’s taken special notice of my red swingline stapler.

“Hey, you have a stapler. You buy that?”

If i say no, I’m afraid he’ll steal it. Thankfully the truth is, “My Fiancee bought it for me, back up cowboy.”

Is there such a thing as a stapler fetish?

It always amazes that when new people come in, they seem to go out of their way to not listen to the people who have been around for a long time. New ideas and outlooks are always good. They’re great! but at the same time those of us who have been here a while know some ins and outs that should be appreciated. Instead we’re treated like morons who can’t appreciate the way things work or “the process”

Frustrating sometimes.

The courtesy desk is in theory the first line of defence for the department associates. Turning away the truly lame people trying to return things with KMart or target price tags still on them.

They’re not supposed to (at least when I was there) make decisions without consulting the electronics department associates. I was one of those.

One night I go up to get our returns and find a small box. THe kind bracelets come in or a pair of ear rings. The little cardboard jobs with a lid. Well I open it up and inside are 6 little computer chips. The kind you’d solder on to a logic board somewhere. No idea what they did.

“what’re these?”

“Computer memory.” the courtesy clerk replies.

“Perhaps for a Radio Shack computer project or a really old, big calculator. Not for anything we sell.”

“they said each one was 1mb of computer memory.”

“well they lied.”

“Can you do anything with them? Put them on the shelf with a UPC?”

“Uh, no”

Blank stare………

“I’ll figure out how to claims them. THanks.”

That wasn’t the only time something like this happenned, that’s a different entry. In the end we just put the little ear ring box of computer chips under the register hoping it’d get lost at some point. We couldn’t claim it, since a claim goes back to the vendor, they’d immediately see that these six little whatevers were not PNY 1mb RAM sticks. By the way, at this time, a 1mb stick of RAM sold for about 50 bucks. Good thing the loss went against the electronics department, we weren’t high shrink or anything