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!
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