Work-Life
Once upon a time I thought I’d be a writer and support myself working in publishing. What a cliché. The publisher I worked for taught me to use PC’s, back when PC’s were only just entering the business market and were just past the stage where floppy disks were seven inches in diameter. This translated into a much different career, one I’ve enjoyed a lot over the years, even though I’ve ever been as technically skilled as many people assume I am. I’ve always known just enough to get by, but always learned just a little more as the jobs or job requirements have changed over the years. But one thing I’ve sort of been (perhaps unduly) proud of is that I’ve never worked on a failed project. Now I’ve worked on two. Do I feel a little like a Jonah? Yeah, but I shouldn’t.

The job before this one, the project failed on a number of counts: we ran through a five-year budget in less than two years; we weren’t allowed to have the kind of client contact necessary to understand their specific needs or to persuade them that the project would succeed let alone be of any benefit to them; the company got taken over and the new upper management team were sceptical of the benefits and aghast at the waste. The entire project team got canned, and we flooded the market, leaving me and others of us unemployed for some months thereafter, a personal financial debacle we’ve yet to fully recover from.

Now it’s happened again. At least this time I stand to keep my job for a while yet, because the project was actually successful, and we’ve been paying employees on the new database for two years now. Only because some of the payroll staff are dissatisfied with having to do business differently than they used to – well, and because there are some real functional problems with the software that aren’t going to be resolved anytime soon – we’ve decided to revert to the previous software. I’m not particularly technical, even now, after over fifteen years working on this stuff, but the old product – even with the upgrade it’s undergone and the development being undertaken by the vendor – is so old-fashioned that I’m appalled at the decision. I don’t get to do anything more than that about it, though, just sort of gape in awe at the decision and then get on with the work of helping put things back the way they were. Nevertheless, the project can now only be said to have been a failure, so that’s two.

And hence the job-search. The old database is, essentially, non-commercial. As such, working on it puts me into a bad position. I can only continue to present a valid hiring profile to any prospective employer if my c.v. reflects a background in commercially viable product implementation and development. In-house stuff can’t ever do that, even if I’m using MS-Access, because the business world has moved beyond that kind of data handling solution. Even Microsoft is moving away from supporting the use of Access as anything more than a way for home PC users to catalog their CD collections. And IBM? Well, they haven’t been much of a player in the software market from a very long time ago now, and that’s were we’re heading, so it’s even further off the mainstream.

I’ll do what I can to help, because I’m a good boy, a committed employee in a organization that fosters positive relationships with its staff, but the first good prospect that comes along is going to get a hard sell from me. Meanwhile, I’ll work on my disgruntlement.