11.17.2002

The Dotcom Pointy-haired Boss Syndrome

Wow, what a great article. Yeah... I been there.

Results, if You Can Handle the Workload

Years ago, in high school, I had the opportunity to learn BASIC programming on a mainframe. Although I had some computer exposure in the years to come, it wasn't much and when I finally moved to Denver in the early 1990s, I started work here as a $5.00/hour file clerk. I hated the long days of bending over a filing cabinet stuffing papers into folders - documents that would probably never be touched again, if the condition of the other paperwork in the drawers were any indication. Moreover, I had to do it all in high heels. They were very uncomfortable to stand in all day long. Working for temporary agencies, I could never take them off, or the client would complain and then they wouldn't send me out on any more assignments. Even once I graduated to answering phones, they stuck to the you-must-wear-heels routine. I thought it was the silliest requirement of all, as I was firmly behind a kiosk with no chance of getting up and moving about. I got around it sometimes by wearing sneakers over my pantyhose, on the pretext that I would change into my heels once I got to work. If they didn't seem to notice, I wouldn't. However, this isn't really telling you how I got back into IT.

My career meandered along. Through the years, I held one clerical job after another, but I learned quickly, and picked up a variety of software packages in my travels through the bowels of Corporate America. Finally, I landed at a smaller telecom company. My position was ostensibly administrative, but the IT boys felt they didn't have to do anything to help the salespeople in my department. Where they left a gap, I stepped in. I taught myself whatever I could by hanging around them, eavesdropping whenever I could. Then the company reorganized and fired most of its sales department, including me.

Now, I could have gone back to the comfortable old routine, as several of my peers had - they'd been promoted from receptionist to executive assistant, and from there were hoping to make office manager or human resources assistant. I wanted more out of my career than that, because I knew that IT paid more and you didn't have to wear heels. I rewrote my resume, using the earliest form of what would later become my Job Fairy skills. In this new and abbreviated version, I removed all my administrative experience and listed only the bullet points that related to my technical skills. At the bottom, I reiterated all my software and hardware skills. It was a very short resume, but it did the job.

I was picked up by a defense contractor to work on their helpdesk. I can't recommend helpdesk work enough. You're immersed in a technical environment for 8 - 10 hours a day, you're surrounded by other technical people, and you have access to the higher tiers of support personnel so you can ask them questions. Plus the work comes in bursts, so you have free time to play with code or hardware or learn the intricacies of configuring Apache. By this time in the mid 1990s, my pay had more than tripled.

Within six months after starting with the help desk, I got an offer to go to a major telecom company as a server support technician. Although it was a junior position, my pay was now more than four times more than when I'd started out. Each time I took a new contract position with my agency, my pay went up because I had acquired more experience. I took the six Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) courses; within a year, my pay had jumped by $20,000. I hadn't even taken the tests! Shoot, I didn't even have a college degree yet. However, whenever one contract ended and another one began, I did as I had always done - I told my agency I was up for whatever they could throw at me. Whatever the assignment, I tried it. I figured the worst the client company could do was send me back if I wasn't good enough. That was never the case - I tried hard and they knew it. By the time I was offered a permanent job with one of the clients, I was making eight times my original salary.

Nevertheless, the economic downturn came, and layoffs happened (yes, even to Fairies). I took a job with a dot-com, which allowed me to focus on web-based development. A year or so later, when they went out of business, I was ready to move on anyway. I took various senior technical troubleshooting assignments after that, each of which presented me with skill-building challenges. Despite the slow economy, I had so many skills listed on my resume by now that recruiters kept calling. It didn't hurt that I had my resume listed on over 50 job boards.

These days, I'm a web developer for a young software dot-com. It's fun, I like the work, the people are nice, and it's unstable as h***. Who knows if they'll be in business this time next year? - but it doesn't matter. I'll have picked up an armload of lucrative new skills by then. I'll never have to wear high heels anymore - even to an interview. And following the migrating technology, it will be time to move on.

And now Flannel says she's happy.

Additional tips:

• Take as many courses as possible - whether going back to college or professional seminars. No less than two a year; preferably at least one technical training per quarter
• Don't wait for the "perfect job" - go for the one with the most challenge or whatever your agency thinks you could do. They make money if they sell you, so they may be able to see something in you that you don't
• Become best friends with your recruiter/temp agency - it's a win/win situation if you're both making money
• Even if your job isn't supposed to be technical, you can learn about computers, networking, and software in the course of your other duties. Support people in IT are always overworked; you can befriend them, pick up tips from them, and help fix little problems at your colleagues' PCs so they are free to concentrate on the bigger stuff if you go about it in a tactful and low-key way
• Decide that IT work is to be your career goal, and make all your other work decisions based on that knowledge
• Don't stay at a job too long - 18 months max! (See Moore's Law; if you don't know what that is or why it applies, look it up on Google)
• Don't stay at a company too long, but it's OK to leave and come back later
• Don't take a job because it's comfortable and familiar. Each new job should have you sweating bullets because you have so much to learn so fast. Each new job should be a stretch; you should feel the burn!