Different Points Of View

Different Points Of View was Originally Posted on May 5, 2014 by lavarock

On another forum, a user gave some details about his job and asked whether he should quit or not. He was working more than 40 hours a week and was overloaded with work. He wanted a reduction of hours and a raise in pay. I don’t know if he deserved a raise but the boss told him he was not working efficiently.

The following is my reply, containing personal examples. Oftentimes when we are presented with a problem, we tackle it the only way we know how. It does not always work to our advantage to do that. I feel that by understanding how others have performed similar tasks, helps us all to see if we are way off base with our own actions. Note that I don’t directly say whether he is right or wrong, only what my situation was and of course, I worked for a very good and caring company at the time.

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I have worked for many companies in my life. The last two are worth mentioning as they were both in the same field, computers. The first one was a family business run out of the bosses house. He had a mainframe in the basement and did top secret government work. The rest of the time we did some time sharing to outside customers. It was a unique job and fun. I worked there for many years and we expanded to perhaps 8 people and opened an office across town. Between programming and managing the computers (we now had a second), we also did a few field trips to test the bosses electronics vrs programs and attended trade shows.

After many years I had accumulated 6 months or more of vacation time (yes, I could take off for more than 6 months and get paid). The company hit hard times (turns out later that the secretary was stealing and some of those funds were government funds). Anyway, a large computer company offered me a job and I reluctantly took it. I hated leaving the family business for a large company (150,000 employees), but did so with my current bosses blessing. My salary would double overnight and so I left the vacation time with the old boss, whom I was still friends with.

The new company offered a *ton* of perks. We had free doughnuts, coffee and sometimes free soda. We had a profit-sharing plan, medical, dental, flexible time off (so we didn’t have to lie when we wanted to vacation using sick leave). We had company picnics and team spirit gatherings. We had retirement plans, stock options and a credit union on site. If I needed to go to another office, the company gave me a vehicle to use. All was sweet.

I stayed with this second company for 17 years, doing the exact same job at two different locations. The company paid to relocate me to the new site. I accumulated lots of overtime and this time was encouraged and sometimes forced to take time off. In the end I was offered a great severance package as the company reorganized. To us it was an early retirement but was classified as a workforce reduction. As many people were leaving at the same time, the state unemployment office set up someone specifically to handle us. The company told us that they would not deny benefits and encouraged us to collect unemployment benefits. A year or so prior to announcing the downsizing, the company required some of us to go back to school to work towards a degree. They paid for that! This way when they announced the downsizing we employees who would be leaving were not just left out in the dark with no prospects. That second company has had some hard times and issues since then, but is still out there doing fine.

In both companies I mentioned, and during those approximate 27 years, I enjoyed going to work. Oh, there were days, especially at the big company that I might have wanted to stay in bed, but the pay and the perks outweighed leaving. Most of the time I looked forward to going to work and did not mind staying late, even though I was salaried. I didn’t watch the clock. My boss used to joke saying “We pay you WAY TOO MUCH”, yet continued to rank me high for my job level. We would have yearly performance reviews where my boss and I would compare my performance with other team members in a give and take meeting. Both of us would list good points and bad of my past year and develop a plan on how to better myself.

Although in later years is was not quite the case, when I started that second job, you could pretty much be assured you would work there as long as you wanted, as long as you didn’t screw up too badly. You were encouraged to try new things, but if they didn’t work, to learn from your mistakes. You were encouraged to look for ways to make things more efficient and to innovate.There are at least 3 times I saved the day (one time saving millions of dollars worth of costs) by suggesting and implementing a better solution across our region. I was not a manager, but was allowed to spread my wings and grow.

I say all this because you are at a crossroads of sorts. Should you stay or should you go? I don’t have to understand your situation to offer the following advice:

1) If you are not happy, if you are not looking forward to going to work every day, if you are not trying to get your friends hired there, then you are not happy in that job. If you are not happy, then perhaps there is somewhere else you should rather be. Some people must stay at a job they don’t like because they need the money and have no other prospects.

2) If you think you want to move on, make sure that you understand what opportunities are available to you. It would be foolhardy to quit without another job offer. Some people put themselves into a situation where they are having issues at their current job and have no real prospects. Their next paycheck may come from the state unemployment office while they look for a job.

3) If you do not have good prospects yet, bite the bullet and stay where you are, but keep your eye open for other opportunities. Be ready to apply if a better job comes along, have your ducks in a row (why we line fowl up for this I’m unsure but that is what they say to do).

4) If not done already, document your job and processes. Many people don’t do this because it offers some kind of job security. However, if you decide to leave AND have this kind of information for the previous job, you may get a lot better recommendation letter. The ability to say you created this type of help fro the previous company tells a new prospective company a lot about your ethics.

5) Of course, be careful how you speak with the new prospective company about your last company. You were either fired, or you probably left because of the pay, working conditions, lack of benefits, didn’t fit well in the job or moved. A new company really wants to know what you can do for them and not how horrible the last place was.

Good luck.

An aside to (one of the forum members):

There were times at the big company that I was overworked. One reason we had yearly reviews was to review what jobs I was tasked with and what percentage of my time was doing them. That way the boss could review where I spent my time. It is easy for a boss to pile on work until someone says “whoa” but oftentimes he/she has not kept track of all the tasks assigned. Also it may be that a task one person takes forever to perform can be done by someone else more efficiently. In my second job above, we system managers were responsible for security of at least 10 systems a piece. These other system managers were letting too many issues slide and two of us found a better solution. In the end I implemented a security program that alerted us of issues and I wrote a system to fix many of the issues which kept popping up. In the end I was managing security of 100 system and eliminated the need for 9 others to do 10 systems apiece. When I say “*I*, in reality, the program I wrote did most of the grunt work, I just sat back and “managed” it. isn’t that what computers are for?