I was thinking this morning of the jobs I’ve had and realized that I’ve never applied at a company that I actually wanted to work for. I’ve always just applied at places that had jobs I felt I was qualified for. I remember people talking about when writing a cover letter to describe why you were applying for a position at that company. To me it always seemed pretty self evident that I was applying for a position at that company because they had a job opening. Now that I’m older and somehow more idealistic than the last time I was looking for a job I finally get it.
I’m now 33, soon to be unemployed and I realize that I can’t just keep going to an office everyday at a company that I have no respect for simply because they send me a check every couple weeks. What’s the opposite of selling out? Luckily in the last few days I’ve been exposed to a couple of job opportunities that I could be proud of and that I also think I could do really well. Hopefully one of them will work out, but if not I know that my work experience, and my ability to learn new things quickly will help me find something great.
If you happen to know of an opportunity for a nerd with experience as varied as end user tech support to network/system management to database design and managment to application and web development. Feel free to pass on my resume or point them to this site. I’m also on linkedin and emurse.
As you may have gathered from my open letter to my employer I’m not happy with my current situation and I haven’t been for a while. If you follow me on twitter or facebook you probably know that for the last year I’ve been working 60-80 hours a week on a big project. I thought that project was going to enable our small office to grow and become a legitimate branch of our new parent company. However as of last week it turns out that now that our parent has our open cases, and thereby our clients, they are closing our office as of April 2nd.
My last day will actually be April 30th. I’m not really that broken up about this since I was already looking for a new job, but I do feel awful for the staff in our small town office. I especially feel bad because since I started at this small company 7 years ago everything I’ve done has laid the ground work for this. First I built a system to allow us to take on a huge new client and then other clients. Having those clients led to our first being purchased by a big insurance company and then resold to an even bigger insurance company. Now working on this last migration I’ve directly enabled them to bring our work into their main office.
So what does working for a company for over 7 years, and giving up a year of your life to try to meet unrealistic deadlines with empty promises of being “taken care of” get you these days? A tiny reference letter that someone’s secretary printed out and mailed to me. In fact it probably took more time for me to sign for the letter (really USPS I need to print my name twice and sign it another two times for this?) than it did for the letter to be written.
I’m not really sure what the future holds for me yet, but I have high hopes that I’ll actually find a job that I’ll enjoy or at least respect myself for doing, or even just something that’ll give me enough downtime to work on my own things.
