My life has pretty much been taken over by work. I get up, go to work, come home, sleep, then wake up and repeat it all again. On the weekends I hang out with Helen. Work has been going pretty well, learning new things every day, meeting people, and learning important lessons along the way. Looking back I can tell I’ve grown quite a bit just in the past two months. I was talking to a Kiwanian a month ago who runs a Technology firm in Seattle, I was talking to him about what I’ve been doing these past couple years and how I’ve been working for my current company.
He said that while you may not enjoy working for a large corporation and supporting thousands of people, it’s an important, if not vital, experience that everyone needs to have. You can tell when someone has worked for a large corporation, their work ethic, how the interact, plan, and work, is different. He didn’t really elaborate on this. However I think I get what he was talking about. The company I’m at has many different systems, lots of internal applications and services that I’ve never seen before. Working with all of them, I have to think on my feet. In order to do that, I can’t just go off the same old check X settings. Now it requires I have an actual understanding of the system itself and how it works. I need to see what’s going on, what’s different, and what I can do to fix it.
Sometimes it requires I call up other people to ask a question about a specific function of an application. I’ve run into a lot of roadblocks with this, and actually had some people complain about me asking questions. I didn’t quite grasp the concepts of going through the proper channels for asking questions. I do now, and still think it’s stupid. I’ve run into situations where I’m needing to know how to configure a citrix application, going to the man who works on that, I have to speak to another tech, then speak to the lead, then the manager, and finally the manager refers me to someone in the application support department. After that, I speak to that person, who refers me to the man who works on it.
I’ve noticed there are a lot of processes in the company that are out of date, and it requires jumping through a lot of hoops to get those changed. There’s a lot I want to do there, and I’ve tried to get the ball rolling on some things, but despite what I’ve tried, I won’t be able to do anything. There are a lot of things that are preventing me from doing so, the biggest one of all is that I’m a contracter. Despite the day to day interactions I have with everyone, the relationships I’ve built, at the end of the day I’m still a contracter. I’ve tried to get employed direct, however they have their own internal employement process which is geared more towards hiring existing employees then outside employees (which it should be).
I’ve become a bit jaded by all this, and despite my desire to keep working there, it just doesn’t seem to make sense to stay at a company that won’t give me a real career path. It is really frustrating when I come to a company looking for real employement only to be tricked into accepting. When I decided to join this company, I was told by my agent that there was a good chance of being hired direct after 3 months. But this is incredibly unlikely. The reason this company hired contractors was because several people were promoted out of the department. They needed to hire some people to help with the workload while they found replacements. I was one of the contractors hired to help with the workload. Since then they have found replacements. Right now I’m just treading water.
I’m essentially just waiting for my contract to end.
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