RE: longevity

All this talk of longevity made me dig out my resume and review what has
gone on in my past. I will admit there has been a bit of job hopping in my
history. However, several of the changes I was forced into.

After my first two years in the industry, which were at a consulting firm, I
left them because I thought I wanted to be with a regular company and
because they were going to make me go back to the mainframe environment. I
had been on the AS/400 and I wanted to stay on that platform.

Like the Telecom company that I was with for 6 months that decided to move
to Dallas.

The Bridal manufacturer who after 6 months couldn't meet their financial
obligations to their vendors or employees and the owners who didn't trust
computers.

The big company who after two months in my first position promoted me to a
regional position which required me to travel 80% of the time. I thought I
could handle the job but it was out of my league. After 6 months I had to
resign. My original position had already been filled.

The company who after a little over 1 1/2 years was sold & the new owners
decided after the "merger" with another division to move everything to
Wisconsin.

The consulting company that I had worked at for over 2 years laid me off.
The only redeeming thing is they went bankrupt shortly there after (at least
I got my severance pay - unlike some unlucky folks at the end).

Now the company I'm at & have been for just about 2 1/2 years has decided to
move it's "corporate operations & other departments" - mine excluded to San
Francisco. Supposedly, my job is safe. (Do we see a trend here????)

I just wish I was as lucky as some. I will say I have learned to be
flexible. I learn quickly. I adapt and I take it with a grain of salt when
a manager doesn't want to hire me because I appear to be a job "hopper".

Debbie Kelemen
Senior Programmer/Analyst
Chefs Catalog
5070 Centennial Blvd
Colorado Springs, CO 80919
Work: (719) 272-2617
Fax: (719) 272-2627


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Sent: Tuesday, June 05, 2007 7:56 PM
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Subject: Re: longevity

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jfranz wrote:

For what purpose would a happy programmer leave a stable job??? To risk

your

financial
health for 10k more??

The basic answer is that they wouldn't (assuming that we're ignoring
the "10k more" general direction). And that implies that the
programmer who leaves is no longer "happy".

Lots of things can cut happiness until it's gone and is replaced by
dissatisfaction.

I left one job because it became clear that the CISC system
environment was never going to be upgraded to RISC. You can coast
for quite a while at V3R2; there was a _lot_ to investigate in
version 3, but it eventually fades.

I left another job specifically because a department manager
overruled a decision of mine; a particularly disruptive service
problem was a direct result over the next weekend and I was
particularly pleased as I laid the logs and traces on his desk and
told him why it was his responsibility to fix. That was actually a
'final straw'; a few other troubling elements had arisen in prior
months having to do with management-staff trust.

My first real job in this industry was with a multi-billion-dollar,
multi-national, Dow-Jones 50 Industrials company. It was as "stable"
as any job ever could be and I could have maintained "financial
health" for as long as I wanted. (You can always find positions to
move in to in companies that size.)

I'd been there, doing well, for near five years when a friend asked
if I'd consider coming in to a little start-up he'd been running. It
was an obvious major risk.

Around the same time, the corporate V-P responsible for our division
had been making speeches from headquarters on the east coast to
employees, telling us all that minor restructuring was coming to
realign various units in little ways that wouldn't be much noticed
by any of us. As I watched tapes of him (before The Internet and
what have you) and listened to how he talked, I kept getting the
uneasy feeling that he resembled the U.S. Attorney General a while
earlier saying 'all is well; no one has done anything criminal' in
the months before Nixon resigned.

My thoughts were tumbling around the concept of 'financial security'
and it was obvious that sticking with my current job was where that
'security' was. But somewhere during that weekend of decision, the
thought came to me "*I* am my security!" And it has never left my
mind since then. I realized that I _never_ should assign my own
security to anyone else. And I turned in my resignation the next
week and haven't regretted it one bit.

Life was tough at a number of points for years after.

OTOH, within a year, the local previous-employer site had closed
down and the data center had moved to Portland, OR, some 50 miles
south. Most of the developers spent quite a while scrambling to find
new jobs while I'd been building relationships in the area for over
a year. Those who moved with the data center got another surprise
some 18 months later when there was a second move to Dallas, TX.

I could've had "financial health" in an unbroken string. I chose
physical and mental health instead.

It took a lot of time and effort, but "financial health" came out of
the relationships I formed. It doesn't come from a "stable job". It
comes from being a stable individual regardless of the job.

This is the U.S.A. It _is_ the 'land of opportunity'. It is what you
make of it. It never should be how much you make in a job; it's what
you _do_ with what you make.

Tom Liotta