Re: A rant, a rant, my income for a rant. (long)

On Sat, 15 Dec 2007 12:38:38 +0000 (UTC), Tai <tai@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

While pretending to be roadkill on the InfoBahn, <usenet@xxxxxxxx> scrawled:
On Fri, 14 Dec 2007 22:08:09 +0000 (UTC), Tai <tai@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

I will note that I actually took a 20% paycut and a demotion to
take the above mentioned job. It was 4-5 years of hell, but damned good
resume fodder.

In my own experience, the line on the resume is never worth the hell. I'll
take the better workplace, higher pay rate, and obscure company name.

It got me away from lan/windows into unix/security, so that's
good. However, as a ex-cow-orker said - if he knew what he knows now
(and he likes his current place), he'd have left after 1 hour. And,
unfortunately, I was an indentured servant at that place[1], so it was
not as easy to move.

Damn, that sounds familiar. I had a similar (emergency) move once, and
while on paper it looked fantastic, it turned out that the new team were a
bunch of completely disorganised corporate rejects aping (and probably
interfering with) the work of the actual Unix team, who were in a
different part of the building.

Their idea of training people who knew nothing about Unix systems was to
give them the root passwords to the extremely old and fragile corporate
infrastructure boxes responsible for handling fifty billion dollars a year
of taxpayer money.

No manuals, cheat sheets, notes or documentation. No mention of the 'man'
command. No training sessions. Barely any communication at all.

I'm surprised the organisation actually made it through in one piece until
the team was forcibly disbanded some months later.

And yes, in hindsight I should have gone to higher management after the
first day there and told them where they could stick their job and their
team. Unfortunately, I was still young, naive, and under the impression
that if I couldn't see any positives to the existence of the team, I must
not be looking hard enough.


And then it happened again this year with a security team. That one was
just a short-term contract, though, so it was over soon enough. That, and
I spent the entire time there documenting exactly how screwed their setup
was, and dragging their management into meeting after meeting to bitch
about it.

I still haven't managed to annoy someone enough to be fired from any job.
I'm wondering what it takes - do I have to dance on the tables? Set fire
to the CEO? Feed my co-workers to the shredder?


-SteveD
.

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