Updates and Reflections on the Real World

As many of you know by now, I’ve quit my job. No, I didn’t have anything already lined up. No, I didn’t have a brilliant plan for finding a new job right away. Yes, I know that it sounds like a remarkably stupid move on my part. But I also know that after four months of praying and pondering, it felt like the right thing to do. So for the third time in my year and a half of employment hell, I am unemployed.

I had my reservations about the real world when I set out from college, but I didn’t expect things to be quite like this. I mean, I’d read my fair share of Dilbert strips, but even they couldn’t quite prepare me for what I was going to find. Let’s take a brief look over the last eighteen months.

Job 1

At my first job post-graduation, I was literally interviewed and hired for one job (editing the work of technical writers) and put to work doing another (doing the technical writing myself). Normally this wouldn’t have been so bad. I’m sure I could do technical writing if I had to (and if I knew beforehand that that’s what I’d be doing). But this job was special: the company had taken on a ridiculous, impossible project, agreeing to do too much work in too little time for too little money, and now they were stuck.

They were burning through people at a remarkable clip—they hired seasoned tech writers who couldn’t keep up with the deadlines and had to be replaced after a week or two—and I was caught in the midst. To top things off, the project management was a poor communicator and a worse manager; I think he literally would have been cracking a whip over my head if he had only had a whip.

After my first week, when I barely managed to turn in a 128-page document thanks to the project manager working overtime to help me finish it, they put me on desktop publishing. But we were still commuting from Provo to downtown Salt Lake, and the long drive was killing me. I told them that I have health problems (chronic fatigue syndrome) and that I was starting to get seriously sick; I needed to cut back to part time until we could move up to Salt Lake. But they didn’t have any part-time projects at the moment, so I went home, still technically on their payroll but with no work to do.

Job 2

Luckily, I found a permanent job only a few weeks later. It paid less than the last job, but still more than I was making as a student. And better yet, it was a real editing job, not an editing-oh-wait-it’s-really-insane-tech-writing job. Of course, my boss was kind of psycho and hard to get along with, but I was making progress on that front right up until they laid us off because they were running a little low on cash.

I still can’t figure out why they hired a third editor only a couple of weeks before they decided to lay us off. Apparently someone wasn’t managing the budget very well. They should have seen it coming, though, because they laid off and outsourced the phone people a few weeks before hiring the third editor. Here’s a tip: when your product is docments, don’t lay off all your editors and put a graphics guy in charge of editing. Oh, and they also hired more sales guys shortly before letting us go, because apparently an increase in quantity will make up for a terrible dive in quality.

The worst part, of course, is the way in which they relieved us of our jobs. My boss was about to go on vacation. Before she left, the senior management told her that if she fired her two underlings, they’d give her that raise that she’d previously asked for and been denied. She rightly decided that this was a bad sign, and she got to spend her vacation brooding about it.

But when she came in on Monday morning, it was already too late—the VP of publishing (the aforementioned graphics guy) had already told me and my coworker that our jobs were terminated as of last Friday (thanks for making me come in to work just for that). She always came in later than us, so she arrived to work to discover that we were gone and that she was next on the chopping block. Of course they never planned on keeping her and giving her a raise. Backstabbing weasels don’t work that way.

Coincidentally, they’re looking for an editor for probably the dozenth time since laying us off a year ago. Maybe they’ve just been unsuccessful in finding someone, but more likely they are experiencing a terribly high turnover rate. That’s really no surprise, since the advertised pay range has steadily decreased with each posting. Hey, here’s a news flash for the management at Job 2: you’re a bunch of cheap, backstabbing weasels. Of course you can’t afford to hire and retain good employees.

Wow. This post is already much longer than I thought it’d be, it’s time for bed, and I haven’t even touched Job 3 yet. I guess you’ll just have to wait for the rest.

This entry was posted by Jonathon in Work on Monday, October 9th, 2006, at 10:23 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed . You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.