The Job Thing

On the one hand, I want to recap what's been going on at work, but on the other hand it's going to be pretty foreign to just about everyone that reads this with the exception of only a couple of people.

First up, let me try an explain what it was that I do for a living. This in itself is always a bit of a task. Primarily I am a Lotus Domino developer and administrator. That, even to most people in I.T., generally gets a blank stare. I also manage and develop the corporate intranet, websites, and extranets and this includes not just the programming, but the business process analysis, graphic design, photography, and everything else that goes into it. It's a complex job that I have been doing now for almost ten years (the last 2½) with this company and the number of people in Vancouver that work at my level in this area is pretty small.

I am not a web-monkey, banging out HTML in Dreamweaver. Nor am I a low-level programmer working in C. I do work with server side scripting languages like PERL and ASP, but it isn't a big part of what I do. I'm not a designer spending my days doing things like getting the drops of water on a picture of a tomato just right, but I can do that sort of thing, and do it when it is called for. Generally the coding part and graphic design parts of it all are the easy part. If that's all there was to my job I'd be in a cubicle making half the money. It's understanding the politics of the business that is the hard part. And I don't just mean the office politics, although that is part of it, but how a lot of what I am doing is intended to influence provincial forest policy, U.S. trade policy, environmental groups, and things at that level. I talk to and work with people on a regular basis who directly influence forest policy for the province and the country, and what I do is designed to help them do these things. Some days I'm writing code, some days I'm writing reports, some days I'm writing press releases. It's a damned interesting job, and I like it. It's also a job that not just anyone could do.

Most of the time I don't have anything specific just handed to me where I just have to bang out code and make it work. Most of the time I have to interpret fairly broad business objectives, understand where they fit into the broader picture, and then present plans on how I think it should work. I need to do this at a level not directed at another techie and have it be all about the nuts and bolts, but at an executive level that requires a whole different skill set.

Then along came the sale of the company. It was apparent pretty early on, even before the deal was final, that I would still have a job at the end of it all, but the big question was whether I would have a job that I still liked. For one the new company is publicly traded. Working for a publicly traded company is an entirely different story than working for a privately held company. The problems I have with public ownership, stocks and stock-holders, and speculative capitalism are best reserved for another rant or this will turn into a book.

There were, and there remains, a lot of nuts-and-bolts tasks to complete in order to merge the systems of the two companies. That, as I mentioned above about the coding part of my job, is the easy part. The hard part, the part that has been leaving me stressed out and most sapping my energy was figuring out how to position myself to end up with a job I could live with when the dust settled. That has been an exhausing effort in watching, listening, knowing who not to piss-off, and (much more difficult) knowing who to pick fights with, and having the balls to act on opportunity. The nuts-and-bolts stuff was stressful, too, but not so much in that it was a lot of work, but because if I couldn't actually chew what I bit off, I wouldn't end up where I wanted to be.

A lot of people freaked out when the company sold to a larger one, thinking that the larger company would swoop in and dictate how things would be. I didn't see that that was what was happening at all, not with the way the executive structure was set up for the new company. From what I know of the people involved and what I saw happening I took a couple chances. The details of what I deduced about the way things would end up wouldn't make any sense to anyone who doesn't know the people involved. The jist of it is the owner of the company I used to work for has a personality and a way of doing things that I could count on. I knew that the new company wasn't just buying another sawmill, they were buying into the owner's way of doing things. My immediate boss is an integral part of the making those ways of doing things work.

Bottom line is I read it right. My old boss has become the CIO (effectively, his title is different, and at the moment I can't even remember it) for the merged company. I answer directly to him. Everyone else I worked with now answers to a technical manager who in turn answers to the CIO. My old boss is the only person from our office that is going to have to move to what is now the head office in Kelowna. My job is, in terms of the corporate hierarchy, the same— only now the company is multiple times larger and my responsibilities are larger to match. I will probably have dibs on my old boss' corner office (although I'm not sure if I would take it). I wil unquestionably get a substantial bonus and raise in September.

"Landing on my feet" in this case (as in most cases) was not so much a matter of my technical proficiency at my job, but was more a matter of being able to understand what was going on, as well as being able to speak and write well. One thing that was very instrumental in this case, actually, was a timely and well-written report. I may get chided about being a grammar-nazi here in LJ-land, but in the real world, being able to communicate well makes a very real difference to how much money I have in my pocket.

And now with this 4-day weekend to relax and put all this behind me, I can start getting my personal life back to normal and start having some fun again.