Re: Ginding away- stop putting sand in my oil... Part 4
Trouble is, that means Fri night is a waste.
Does it?
(I was hungover for one of those two Saturdays, and still did my part)
In the context of things, this quarterly Saturdays thing is actually pretty minor - there are other issues that go well beyond this. Career advancement is a big one; between small training budgets and the type of projects I'm working on, I'm not seeing it at this company any longer. The state of the company is another. When I started in March 2011, we were growing and the future looked bright. June 2012, we were sold to an investor group from California who brought in a new CEO (the founder moved to the board). I'm not a dummy, after about six months I could see where this was going. Instead of the original goal of building meaningful relationships with our customers and developing our employees, we started quickly chasing much bigger clients that we were not fully prepared to implement. Sales sold stuff we had to scramble to offer. The level of growth (in terms of deals and employees) that we went through in about 18 months was totally irresponsible, and I practically predicted it. September 2013, without warning, they laid off almost 50 people over 2-3 days and admitted in a Friday afternoon meeting that the company's financial performance did not meet the investor group's goals and that upper management had f*ed up, but of course no upper management jobs were impacted by the layoffs. Our backlog (sold revenue not yet billable) was off the charts - ironically because of resource constraints - but most of all they had incorrectly forecasted the amount of business/revenue lost from existing customers either leaving or scaling back their services. Granted, we actually did not have much to do with the customer who left - new CEO came in and chainsawed IT costs by getting rid of us - but this is still poor corporate planning.
They've since committed to providing monthly financial updates (which they have), and the financial situation appears to have improved, but it's really irrelevant. Upper management can pay as much lip service to caring about us and the future of the company as they want, but all the investors care about is whether they're getting the return they expected (as they should - it's what they do), so they're really the ones dictating the direction of the company, whether that's trying to take us public, beefing us up for buyout by a Big 4 firm, or some other plan. Of course, we don't know what their long-term plan is, as they've been mute.
I'm tired of playing the game, and it's time for me to go.
aparch: Bachelor's in Information Systems, Master's in Information Technology Management. And I have little problem with Chicago, I've been there. It's what Detroit could be, if it wasn't run by incompetents.
