New job - sorta
Posted: Wed Sep 13, 2017 1:09 pm
So, officially starting Monday, I have a new job. Sort of. Our department has been going through a re-org (not like all those other times though - this was was for realz!). For the last two months, I've been spending large portions of my days twiddling my thumbs and wondering where I'm going to land. The entire department wasn't taking on any new work because they wanted to be able to move people once the decisions were made, without negatively impacting work in progress, and letting them start fresh in their new roles. So they solved that problem by letting people basically not work. Everyone has been in system containment/support mode for months.
For the past 15 years at the university, I've been a software designer and developer, database designer/developer, project manger, business analyst, QA/tester, support technician, and a team supervisor. For many of those years, it was all of those things, all of the time. It wasn't good, and being on the hook for everything meant I could never get particularly skilled at ANYTHING.. making me un-marketable outside of the University.
Anyway... throughout the reorg process, we were shown the proposed new structure, and asked if we had any preferences. No guarantees, but they did ask. The goal was to get away from everyone being a generalist and move towards specialization. In all of the years I've been in software development, playing with data has been my favorite thing. I love being presented with a database and asked for information and mining it out and presenting it for analysis. So, as of Monday, I am now a full-time "Data Architect".
In theory, I should get to spend most of my days doing the stuff that I find entertaining, and none (or very little) of the stuff I found dreadful. There's no change in pay grade, which is fine, but one of the other things this job has that has never existed before, is a defined career path with opportunity for advancement.
I'm looking forward to the change. There's a lot to learn, and it will be a while before I'm able to accomplish anything significant, but I'm happy about the new job. The University is run by old money and old ideas. That doesn't work with technology. Having technology, but choosing to not stay up to date with it, is actually the worst possible thing from a financial perspective. And if you're going to use technology as a tool to keep costs low, and keep operations at peak efficiency, that's occasionally going to require some large capital investments. The ROI will be there, but the investment has to be made. The prior head of our department has been in our department for 45 years. She's never worked anywhere else in her entire life. To say she was clueless about how IT should be run, was an understatement of epic proportions. We hired a CIO a few years ago though, who knew he was coming in to an "immature" IT organization. I don't think he had any idea how bad it really was. But he accepted the challenge and got to work, and now all of the results of those efforts are finally trickling down to me. I've got another 15 years until retirement, and I'm hopeful that the second half of my time here will be something enjoyable.
For the past 15 years at the university, I've been a software designer and developer, database designer/developer, project manger, business analyst, QA/tester, support technician, and a team supervisor. For many of those years, it was all of those things, all of the time. It wasn't good, and being on the hook for everything meant I could never get particularly skilled at ANYTHING.. making me un-marketable outside of the University.
Anyway... throughout the reorg process, we were shown the proposed new structure, and asked if we had any preferences. No guarantees, but they did ask. The goal was to get away from everyone being a generalist and move towards specialization. In all of the years I've been in software development, playing with data has been my favorite thing. I love being presented with a database and asked for information and mining it out and presenting it for analysis. So, as of Monday, I am now a full-time "Data Architect".
In theory, I should get to spend most of my days doing the stuff that I find entertaining, and none (or very little) of the stuff I found dreadful. There's no change in pay grade, which is fine, but one of the other things this job has that has never existed before, is a defined career path with opportunity for advancement.
I'm looking forward to the change. There's a lot to learn, and it will be a while before I'm able to accomplish anything significant, but I'm happy about the new job. The University is run by old money and old ideas. That doesn't work with technology. Having technology, but choosing to not stay up to date with it, is actually the worst possible thing from a financial perspective. And if you're going to use technology as a tool to keep costs low, and keep operations at peak efficiency, that's occasionally going to require some large capital investments. The ROI will be there, but the investment has to be made. The prior head of our department has been in our department for 45 years. She's never worked anywhere else in her entire life. To say she was clueless about how IT should be run, was an understatement of epic proportions. We hired a CIO a few years ago though, who knew he was coming in to an "immature" IT organization. I don't think he had any idea how bad it really was. But he accepted the challenge and got to work, and now all of the results of those efforts are finally trickling down to me. I've got another 15 years until retirement, and I'm hopeful that the second half of my time here will be something enjoyable.