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# A new job
I resigned from my current job yesterday. My last day will be September 25th, then I start work in a new role on Monday the 28th.
I am pretty sure I didn’t piss and moan about this at the time, least ways not on this venue, so for completeness, I was informed in May that my employer intended to renew my contract but only for nine days a fortnight, leaving me with a 10% paycut. At that point all the careful balancing of pros and cons of leaving fell apart like a madly misplayed game of jenga; I was leaving, no matter what. It took me three months. When I started out a recruiter told me ten weeks was the average time it was taking people he worked with to get a new job. Given I was overly picky and pretty relaxed about it all – after all, I wasn’t unemployed, just underemployed – 13 or so weeks is probably on par.
My current employer is a travel company. They sell packaged tours. One of their tour brands is like a Kontiki for sad, wet people. Another sells river cruises for people who suffer under the burden of having too much money. Most of the rest is bus tours for pensioners.
I don’t know if you’ve heard, but apparently the world is undergoing some sort of massive correction in the financial markets. You might be able to imagine what that kind of thing does to travel companies. Suddenly everyone feels like they should hold onto their money. To cut a long story short, it means that my employer had to cut costs.
Allow me a few sentences of rant. I probably won’t get to say this in an exit interview, so I’m saying it here.
The executives all took pay cuts; contractors were required to take cuts to hours. I understand this, they had a problem and they needed to solve it. However the solution to their problem was, partly, to make a small part of their problem a large problem for me. My solution to my problem then is to return their problem to them. With interest. “You want me to cut my hours? How about zero? Does zero work for you?”
I am the only person who has ever worked on this project, this project that handles a significant chunk of their daily business processes. Not the bits that directly make money, but the marketing bits, the bits that lead up to some of that money being made. It doesn’t matter how good my documentation and hand over are because whoever gets lumped with responsibility won’t have four years of working with this thing behind them. The accountants who decided to cut my hours may well find that however much they saved by only contracting me for nine days instead of ten will get blown away by the time wasted having someone else re-learn all the subtleties, knowledge that walks out the door with me.
Rant over.
My new employer is a communications agency. But effectively for me they are a web development agency. I’m looking forward to going to web development. It was what I did primarily until about four years ago – when I became more of a database and middle-ware developer – and I’m excited to be going back. With the usual trepidation. While I’ve tried to stay on top of new developments, I’ve been a little left behind. The next three weeks are going to be interesting while I brush up on everything I should know. But it is a fresh start. I no longer have to support decisions I made as long as four years ago, decisions that are painfully naive in light of things I have learned in since making them. I get to make all new poorly informed decisions, and I get to make them as part of a team.
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# re: A new job
“The accountants who decided to cut my hours may well find that…”
You might like to think that, but I bet they never work it out.
PS, I wanted to comment on your previous post but the followup link didn’t work and I couldn’t find the right starting conditions for the universe.
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# re: A new job
There’s a lesson in that postscript. IF you are going to write your own blogging engine, really write your own blogging engine. Don’t just write enough to get along, because you’re not saving time, saving time would be using Movable Type.
In this case, I bet the Frenchified characters in the title of the last post tripped things up.
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# Congrats man
and yeh I am finding that some technologies I should have learnt 8 years ago are now biting me in the ass, but I am picking it up quick. I am sure you will be fine (if not revelling) in all the new tech.
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287 days since 27/05/2009