In Summary

The reason why I started writing all of this was to document for myself the many ways God worked in this process.  I’m very much like the proverbial man who looks in the mirror and forgets what he looks like, even more so in forgetting the great indebtedness I have to God for the many times He intervenes in my life.

To begin with, there was the whole bit about my manager being a butthead to me in the summer*.  I’m very much a loyalist and prone to learning to live with dysfunctional environments, so without this event I might have never kicked myself out of the nest.  The timing is also a consideration, as are many things.  Had this happened in the spring I wouldn’t have been looking at Linked during the time period when Scott posted that he was leaving.  Had it happened in the fall it would have been too late.  People say that God’s timing is perfect and normally I’m prone to poo-poo these people, but maybe, just maybe, they are correct.

The second thing was the just mentioned post by Scott, which prompted the lunch meeting and gave me a direction of where to search.  Before this I was just a “guy who worked in tech but wasn’t a techie” and was fairly certain that my next job would not be in computers, so low was my estimation of my abilities thanks to a decade plus of neglect.

Number three would be the sudden urgency to get my resume and cover letter completed quickly, even though I had a number of months before I could switch jobs.  If not for getting the resume in that quickly my current job might have gone back to Scott.  Again, that timing knack God has.

A final thing (though surely there are more and I’m just too blind to see them) was getting an interview AND a job offer on my first attempt**.  I didn’t have the emotional reserves to take much rejection and had that occurred I might have slumped into depression and given myself up to my current lot, performing worse and worse until I was fired. 

So thanks God!  Thanks for pulling me through the rough times and growing me and eventually landing me in a position that is both challenging and enjoyable.

 

1/4/22 - A late addition!  Over the past few years I had asked God many times that He would pull me out of that place before it imploded.  I just learned that the head programmer of the "new solution" had left for greener pastures.  The deadline for implementing this was going to be a huge stretch and now it's completely blown out of the water.  Plus a co-worker in my department has/is been out for about a month with a surgery.  This would definitely not have been an enjoyable place to work these past two months. 

 

 

* At one point my wife told me about a conversation she had with our son, about how “something had changed with dad and work about two months ago.”  I went back and checked the date of the message where my manager accused “Did you add this…” and it was almost two months exactly.

** And boy did THAT boost my self-esteem.  Someone wanted my skills and abilities!  Take THAT, Mr. ex-“manager”.

Is This Thread Ever Going To End?

It turns out the place I interviewed WAS talking about me.  I was offered a job and, being a horrible negotiator, took what they offered.  What they offered turned out to be $240 less per year than I was making after my recent raise and a few less PTO days. 

About that raise… Like most corporations the manager is given a pool of money equal to three percent of all their employees salaries.  If someone gets more than a 3% raise then someone else has to get less.  In past years I received the standard 3% raise and hoped inflation stayed low.  This year I received a 2% raise.  A team mate I spoke with received a 2.2%, meaning someone received a very nice raise, indeed!  The person formerly known as my manager mentioned in a department meeting that the new policies gave him greater leeway to distributing raises.  When I questioned the 2% in my private meeting with him I was essentially told “you need to step up your game if you want more.”  This from a guy who also admitted that he didn’t know all the things I did to keep the place running.  “Do more and better but I don’t know how much you’re doing to know if ‘more’ is even reasonable.  For all I know you could be doing three jobs with acceptable accuracy, but still, do more.  But don’t you dare mess up on any of the many things you do.”  What this told me was that I could expect this kind of raise for as long as I continued at Investigo, and probably bonuses as well.  Fortunately, even though this was before I started applying for jobs, I knew that this was likely the last review I’d have with this bloke.

Brotherhood Mutual wanted me to start in three weeks but that was a day that my wife had an expensive medical procedure scheduled, which would be fully paid under the old employer and not the new (it’s just how health insurance works).  Egads!  Brotherhood has orientation sessions every two weeks so now I wouldn’t be able to start for five weeks.  Double egads!  Two weeks is long enough to endure knowing that you are leaving but five weeks?  Pure torture!

But also bliss!  Nothing can touch you during this time.  My team was given more information about the new process and it looked messy.  But I didn’t care… I wouldn’t be doing it.  We were told about new duties we were taking on because certain people had been let go and it looked like a convoluted mess.  But I didn’t care… I wouldn’t be doing it.  At team meeting where we were told about all the challenges coming our way with more work and a tight timeframe… but I didn’t care… I wouldn’t be doing it.  I had my monthly one on one with my manager where he threw a bunch of negatives my way.  But I didn’t care… I wouldn’t be working for him soon.

Everything I read about turning in your resignation said not to give your present employer more than two weeks.  You might think you’re doing them a favor but they could turn around and let you go immediately, leaving you without pay.  So all of the above happened in the first three weeks, with the one on one being just a few days before I was able to deliver the news to my manager.  It was difficult to keep my mouth shut but I did manage to slip in a statement like “I’m work on a plan to improve the quality of my work.”  Like leaving.

The big day arrived and I sent my manager an instant message.  “Can I call you about something?”  Why was my heart pounding?  “Sure” was the response. 

“I need to tell you that I’ve accepted a position at another company.  My last day will be October 22.”  Silence.  I really think he thought he was going to be able to kick me around for as many years as necessary until I could be let go.  I said something about who I thought should handle the various parts of my work and he said something as well.  The whole thing lasted about a minute and a half.  I then contacted team members and a few others in the company that I had worked with, letting them know.  My favorite response “Is this some kind of sick joke?” 

If you thought that my manager would contact me to discuss transition of work duties some time during my final two week you would be wrong.  I stopped expecting it after the first week.  In fact, he didn’t contact me at all.  No email, no instant message, no calls.  “Oh well,” I thought, “I guess he has it all figured out.”  I wrote a few things down and gave them to the team member who would be handling most of my day-to-day duties.  Other than that I just kept on working at my usual pace and quality. 

When an employee leaves it is customary for the manager to send out an email to the company, wishing them well, sad they are going, thanks for all the work over the past seventeen years, etc.  It didn’t happen.  Sure, he sent out an email a year before when an employee that he liked left after five years but I apparently wasn’t worth the effort.  Since I was planning to work very little on Friday* I sent out my own email on Thursday morning.  I got a few responses from co-workers but since we’d been working from home for a year and a half, I think most everyone felt disconnected.  More than one let me know that they were looking for jobs elsewhere.  That’s telling.

On my last day of working at Investigo I logged in, took care of whatever production support issues needed my attention, and attended my last 9:30 daily meeting.  I dinked around a bit and cleaned up my desk and drawers** and then went upstairs to take a shower.  I came back down, checked my email to see if anyone else had written and then left for my long co-worker (solo) lunch (my favorite Chinese place which is waaay across town so I don’t usually go). 

I returned two hours later and saw that my manager broke two weeks of silence by sending me an instant message around 11:15, which I guess I didn’t see earlier when I checked my email.  “Got a minute?”  What’s the point in giving him a minute more of my life?  He’s had two weeks and anything he had to say would be disingenuous.  I signed off my account and closed the Broadridge laptop for the last time. 

 

 

* When we worked in an office and an employee left, it was customary for his team to take him out to lunch early on their last day, to stay away for a 2-3 of hours, and then to leave.  I planned to follow this pattern.

 ** Since receiving the job offer I had moved all of my personal files and deleted them from my laptop.  Seventeen years is a long time to accumulate personal emails and documents and spreadsheets.  The parent company increasingly locked things down over the years so there was no writing to USB drives and anything that even remotely looked like a social security number blocked the entire email.  So how does a fellow get out dozens of spreadsheets, hundreds of emails, and a few databases?  If you have access to the FTP server you find a client who didn’t set up a firewall, that’s how!  Upload from work, download at home.  Yes, I could have easily stolen every single SSN and address of every client we’d had for a decade but of course I didn’t.  That’s where big companies get it so wrong.  Sure, you need to have some safeties in place but mostly all those guards meant to ensure data safety only make people less productive, making the job more difficult and time consuming to do.  Even without the FTP server I could have easily gotten out SSNs etc through email with a simple scramble/descramble spreadsheet.  It’s all about trusting your employees. 

*** Post script: Apparently there was a reason why I felt great urgency to get the application in.  Scott, who I had lunch with, decided he didn’t like where his new job and asked to come back.  However they had just offered me the job.  So instead they created a level three position for him, which was needed, and everyone was happy.  Had I waited even one week my job would have been open and would have gone back to Scott.  God does some pretty nifty things.

Three of a Perfect Pair - The Job Thing

Now that I have direction all I have left is the waiting.  The deciding to leave had been set in stone, encased in concrete and surrounded by metal straps so mentally there was no going back.  I mean, I could start to look for jobs but if I found the perfect job but wasn’t able to even try for it, well, that would be discouraging.  And if I applied for jobs just to get experience interviewing and didn’t get calls for interviews and/or got turned down for jobs, that would be even more discouraging.  Having worked for a decade under a manager who is stingy with compliments* meant I had a pretty low level of confidence.  And by “pretty low” I mean there were times over the years when I felt like I was barely qualified to work in fast food.  When you don’t have a hefty backlog of compliments and self-confidence any kind of mistake can set you back for weeks, maybe even months.  At least for me.  That’s where I was mentally so I didn’t see the point in even looking.  What I did do, though, was to watch videos on interviewing and looking for jobs and hiring practices.  And of course working on my resume.

A month or so went by and my wife had her first kidney stone surgery, recovering more quickly than the surgeon led us to believe.  One down, one to go! 

For at least six years the development team had been working on a new way to process data.  That “team” was one guy who moved to Indianapolis but was allowed to work remotely.  About five years in he quit and they moved other people onto this “very important project.”  Technically there were questions I had about this new process but I’d been wrong before** so I was willing to suspend a decision on if this new process was a good or bad thing until I could actually see it in action.  I did know that we had a horrible track record of handling errors and providing support tools, but since the past programs were more open those of us with a programming background could make them work.  This new process was a black box kind of program so no peeking at the code.***

Since the time that I realized “Hey, I don’t HAVE to work here!” **** they were getting close to having this new process completed and started to show us bits of how it worked.  I’m sure (well, not really) they’ll eventually have the kinks worked out but at the moment it seemed very much like a few steps back, almost into DOS, and very manual.  I do NOT want to have to learn, use and support this tool, I thought.

Then management made what will surely come to be known in Investigo history as one of their greatest blunders.  The biggest and most complicated and widely used data source told us that in one year they would no longer provide data in our existing and very outdated format.  Period.  Hard deadline.  Did management decide to update the existing process to use the new format using a very well known tool?  It would likely take three months but it was very do-able.  Or did management decide to make the very first feed written on the relatively untested, almost experimental, still in development tool this very same complicated feed, a process that would absolutely have to be done within nine months (and if it takes longer then too bad, you’re not getting any more files in your old format)?  Don’t forget the reduced staffing from the recent layoffs!  Go on… take a guess.  I did not want to be around for that train wreck.

By now my wife’s second surgery was scheduled.  Time to start looking!  Remembering the great things Scott said about Brotherhood made me look there first.  Hey, there’s an ETL job, level 2.  I don’t remember that being there before.  What I DO is ETL (export – transform- load, if you must know).  The job had been up for a few weeks and I felt an urgency to apply quickly.  I spent the rest of the week writing a cover letter and focusing my resume for ETL work and sent it in on Friday.  Then I sat back and waited for rejection.

Instead I got a call on Tuesday.  They wanted me to come in for an interview!  That was quick, possibly too quick because my wife’s surgery wasn’t for a few weeks.  But it’s not like I’m going to turn them down.  Time to polish up my dress shoes, buy a new shirt and all that kind of thing.

The interview went well but I didn’t feel like I really knocked it out the park and that I fit exactly who they were wanting.  I wrote the manager a letter, thanking him for the interview and saying that although I might not be able to rocket out of the stable like Scott I was confident that I would be able to become a solid asset.  I didn’t really believe it (such was my mental state) and so told the former co-worker who had been let go about the job, that he seemed like a really good fit, and that this company was having a job fair the next day.  He went the next day but was told that they already had the ETL position filled.  Huh?  Did they already have someone and just felt like they had to interview me because it was scheduled?  I hadn’t been offered a job so why did they turn down even the opportunity to interview a qualified candidate?  I wouldn’t allow myself to hope that they were talking about me but it still made for a less gloomy weekend.

 

* I got perhaps one solid compliment a year, which I saved in a folder. 

** I’d also been right before.

*** The get a bit technical here… the current process uses SQL to look at the data.  The new process uses NiQL, or no sql.  Instead of returning lines of data it formats the results like a letter.  I have no clue as to how you could look at more than one record or how this could be used in the way our current job is done.  But someone supposedly smarter than me was making the decision.  Also, from what I can understand, the files were imported and broken down into individual messages for each line of data, sometimes even down to a message for each bit of data.  These tiny bits then flowed over to another program that would manipulate then, put them back together, and then post them to the firm.  If there were problems anywhere along the way these bits would remain unconnected and unposted.  Would the original files be stored anywhere for us to use in troubleshooting like we do now?  Probably not.  Would we have any way to work on the troubled data?  They were building tools right now and hope to have them done soon!  So if there are problem we’d have to work on one record at a time?  What if there were thousands of records with the same issue?  “We’re getting around to that!”  Should I mention that they still had issues with the posting tool they created six or seven years ago?  And that the current process had held/unposted data going back at least five years?

**** Did I mention that the job market was really hot?  Employees all over were jumping ship and employers were desperate.  I felt like the perfect candidate for lowered expectations!

Job Change Journaling : Part The Second

I had felt stuck in my job before, thinking that I just had to live with how things were until I was let go (and then basked in 9+ months of accumulated severance pay) or the company imploded.  How realistic were either of these?  Very.

We had known for two or three years that our biggest client was leaving us for a competitor in the fall. And by “biggest” I mean around a third of our income.  If the sales people were out there trying to sell our service to make up for it you couldn’t tell… all they brought back was the one new client and they had been promised the kinds of “give you the moon” extras that experience showed we could not fully deliver and resulted in the client being upset and leaving after a few years when their contract was up.  Then two more clients decided not to renew, bringing the total to 40% of our income going bye-bye.  So management did what they always do.  They cut staff.  Fortunately, I made the cut but they axed seven out of about forty employees*.  They intended to replace some of the loss by selling more products to one of our other clients and a second client had two of their five divisions with us and there had been talks (seemingly for years) about bringing over the other three divisions.

Then we got client satisfaction surveys back.  One of the two clients gave us a neutral score and the other one gave us a negative score.  I’m not thinking either of them is jumping at the chance to give my former employer more money.

To summarize, I felt stuck on a sinking ship. 

God to the rescue!  I don’t take credit for any of this, other than trying to follow through on the nudges that certainly came from Him. 

At this time it’s early summer.  My wife had just been in the hospital for almost a week with sepsis (she’s fine now, thank you for asking) and had to have two surgeries to remove kidney stones.  Our health insurance deductible was obviously met and if I switched jobs we would start over again, costing about $5000 to $7000 or whatever the deductible was of the new employer.   And that’s assuming I could find a job quickly.  My plan was for me to start working on my resume and looking around.  Hopefully I would land a job in the fall or early the following year.  It has been nearly two decades since I interviewed and my resume was definitely in need of a good dusting off.   

My other, and perhaps biggest issue, was that because my company builds everything in-house and has their own idiotic names for things (one program is actually called “Tom Cruise”… fun but impractical) I didn’t even know what kind of job I should be looking for.  I definitely wasn’t a DBA or a C++ programmer, so what was I?  After a decade of barely receiving more than a dripple of positive feedback** what was I good at?  It occurred to me (or the Holy Spirit whispered) that I should ask former co-workers I knew who had moved on, people who had worked in a lot of different companies. 

My first thought was someone I knew only slightly but who had been the head of an IT department.  But how to contact him?  LinkedIn seemed the best choice, a platform I rarely used.  So I opened it up for the first time in months and in the feed saw that a former co-worker, Scott G, was leaving a job at Brotherhood Mutual.  Yeah!  Scott was exactly the kind of guy I should talk to!  I hadn’t talked to him in probably a dozen years but had enjoyed working with him.  I reached out and amazingly he was willing to meet me for lunch.  I told him my plight and he asked what I did and what I liked to do.  He suggested that I look for a Data Analyst position but later when I looked at job requirements it seemed like this was something completely out of my experience.  He also told about the job we was leaving and had some very good things to say about Brotherhood Mutual, a 100 year old company that provides insurance for churches and church-type ministries.  It’s strange that even though my first decade of working was in an insurance company I had not even considered Brotherhood Mutual as an employer.  Overall it was good to catch up with Scott and I felt encouraged.

The next person I “lunched” with was a guy who had been a contractor.  I was a bit wary because I remembered this guy as a negative Nelly but he’d survived four decades in IT so he should be able to give me some direction.  He didn’t.  He said that at my age (50) I should just stay put or else I’d be the old guy in a young mans world, constantly having to prove myself.  Since I knew he was a downer I wasn’t too discouraged but it did let a little wind out of my sail.  But it was very early in my job quest and my wife had two surgeries that my employer had to pay for so I knew I had time. 

Ya know, I never did meet with the original guy I thought of. 

In any case, at least now I had some direction.

 

* Including a guy in my department that they hired just six months earlier.  This just seems suspicious and rotten to me… my manager knew our biggest client was leaving, that the other two were probably leaving and that employee cuts were likely to happen.  And yet he hired the guy anyway knowing (or at least I strongly suspect) that he was going to let him go.  But hey, it’s just business.  That’s exactly what I thought as I realized that I owed Broadridge nothing more than the current days work and that I was free to move on. 

** I’ll admit that I wasn’t a perfect employee but I was pretty dang good.  B+ perhaps?  I took initiative in working on issues and owned processes.  The number of things I did right in a month far outweighed things I did wrong.  For the most part I kept the wheels greased on that machine, a task that isn’t usually given much notice until the grease is no longer there and the wheels seize up.  My biggest issue is that I was under employed in a job that didn’t utilize my strengths.  Plus I was performing almost identical tasks over and over.  For fifteen years (the first two years were a hodge podge of different jobs until they formalized the Production Support department).  I was doing this work because, over time as it accumulated, I would see maintenance type things that needed done but no one was doing them.  Did I get sloppy?  I certainly did.  I had tried over the years to get to be able to do something different but what always happened is that any new person hired would be moved to a much-needed role and I’d still be there greasing the wheels.  My level of caring ebbed and flowed over the years but most of the time I wanted to do a good job and make the client happy.

Overdue For A Change - Entry 1

 

It was a perfect storm.  Or maybe just a regular storm whose time was overdue.

I had been at my current job for almost seventeen years.  Like most of us it wasn’t a job I loved or was passionate about, but it was tolerable and (mostly) paid the bills.  A year earlier they sent us to work from home due to el covido and a few months later decided to close the office and have us work from  home permanently.  Personally I don’t think that working from home full-time is a viable long term solution unless the office makes a very intentional effort to communicate.  My former office has yet to make the transition.  In an office environment the managers would be in their continual meetings and in between meetings, while on their way to get coffee or water or whatever it is managers drink, they would see the unwashed minions and recall something in the meeting that should be told to the employee(s) so projects could go smoothly.  This didn’t always happen in the virtual environment.  That’s domino 1.

Like most non-rich people I turn our heat down at night during the winter months.  The only place for my work desk, without disrupting our entire household (we homeschool so everyone is always home), is in the basement.  Heat rises, cold air sinks, and in the morning when I started work in the winter it was 60 degrees.  So I would work with a blanket wrapped around me for a good part of the day.  Even in the summer it barely gets over 68 in our basement and due to the open construction of my working space, a space heater won’t work because the heat would all rise to the upper floors.  I suffered through one finger-numbed winter working in the basement but did not want a repeat for year ad finitum.  Domino 2.

Domino 3 is that a long-term co-worker left for another job in January, about nine months into working from home.  She did a lot of the initial set up and posting reconciliation when a new firm came on board.  I was the steps in between, taking all the raw historical files from the client, checking for missing files, doing a bit of updates as needed to fit our format, and generally making sure all the data got posted to the clients database*.  My manager must have assumed that I knew everything she did.  Also it had been over two years since we last did an implementation so you know how infrequently used instructions tend to slip from your mind.  Domino 3

At the beginning of 2021 we had a new firm to implement, I was getting extra work from the co-worker leaving, I was frequently very cold**, and things were brought up in meetings that I wasn’t told.  Also did I mention that since the last implementation they had gotten rid of Account Executive positions?  In the past Account Executives would monitor the implementation and kind of act like project managers.  They knew the data and the client and would check that it looks reasonable.  I don’t know the data but I know the files… domino 4?  Anyway the implementation was the usual “rush, they need it now!” I spent a ton of time adding and updating codes to the client database so their data would post because one part of our process is broken.  There’s no urgency to fix it because it normally is only used with new firms.  I thought I pulled a rabbit from the hat and was able to get their files scrubbed and posted by the deadline, even with a lot of missing code research.  Huzzah for me!  I felt like I accomplished something big but I didn’t get any kind of thanks from anyone. 

Because I had so little time to get the work done and was so focused on fixing code errors so the data would post I didn’t notice that there very few reconcile errors.  Clients can have us reconcile their data, like a bank statement, or just have us push it in there.  The client I used as a template was our biggest client so I figured they were set up correctly (if in doubt on a code, we always use the code in this client because they have been heavily researched and analyzed).  It turns out they were a “push it in there” client, a setup step the former coworker would have done and no doubt done correctly.  Due to low staffing (layoffs) no one checked my work and it wasn’t noticed until a month or so later when the client began to review the data.  They were not pleased and my manager was not pleased and he let me know.  “I expect more from a senior level person,” said my manager.

Then one Friday afternoon a week or two later my manager sent an instant message to me, asking if I added a record to an obscure table of a database that we used to process the data for this new client.  I hadn’t even heard of this table and there was just one very specific record in it with a code I’d never heard of.  I replied “No” and he replied “Yes, you did.  This caused [specific technical problem with the new client.]  We’ll talk about this on Monday.”  And that was that.  I sat there flummoxed and then did some digging.  It turns out the database with the obscure record was copied from another database and this record IS used in the original database.  But whoever copied the database didn’t clear out the tables and this record sat, waiting like a landmine until enough new clients were added so that it matched up.  It matched up with this particular already upset client.

Even though my manager didn’t discuss the item with me on Monday (or even directly ever again***) I can point to this exact exchange as the moment I knew my time there was over, that it was time for a change.

 

 

* Most of my work involved the raw files coming from clients and make sure the data was correctly changed and placed into the client database.  It was extremely rare for me to use the app, review any of the reports generated from the data or review the data once it made it into the client database.  There was plenty to keep me busy on the front end so I just didn’t work on those kinds of tickets.  As far as my fifteen years of experience with “posting” was concerned, my work was done with it made it into the client database.

** Did you know that it’s difficult to concentrate when your fingers a numb?  Go figure!  It’s also difficult to concentrate when you homeschool and have four children frequently thunking over your head.

*** The problem was brought up in conversations about the poor client implementation, but he never addressed the cause.  On Monday I told him what I found without a response.  I guess he expected me to scour established databases for rare records.  Or maybe he expected that with severely limited resources and a time crunch that I would change up how I’ve successfully completely about forty implementations in the past and begin to scrutinize the data, something the Account Executive would have done and caught.  While I’m at it, another issue that I apparently failed on was an established data set where I check for completeness via sequential suffix numbers.  If none are missing then we are not missing any files.  Or at least that’s how it’s been for the past fifteen years and 40+ implementations.  This bozo client decided to not receive pricing files.  Since these files were never sent they weren’t assigned a suffix number and thus weren’t missing.  How the client was able to even use this data without a price file is a mystery.  But, you know, a senior level person should have caught that.  Do you know who would have caught that?  An Account Executive who was running test reports in the app.  See asterisk 1 above.