This happened to me because I was so desperate to prove myself to a faceless company. It happened because I wanted to be acknowledged. I wanted an “Operational Excellence” cube to put on my desk. I wanted to be doing something more than swimming around aimlessly in my own little pond.
When I first joined Insight, I did so as a designer, because that’s the skillset I had. I wanted to be a programmer. I never really enjoyed being a designer. Control freak managers who tried to design websites over my shoulder had already tainted the whole experience of graphic design for me. They weren’t designers, and I wasn’t an automaton, so the stuff always turned out crap because the only pleasure in design is using your creativity. The actual process of drawing the design is pure drudgery. Now if anyone tries to interfere I stop them. “I’m the designer. Let me worry about the design. You worry about the content and the structure.”
I digress. I joined Insight, and after a few months of making absolutely no impact on a project that was being controlled by a bunch of monkeys in the states, I was fortunate enough to make myself indispensable in redeveloping the intranet reporting system. It needed to be multilingual, and support multiple countries from one code base, the kind of functionality an average programmer dreads. I rewrote it and I did a damned good job of it. I was expecting a cube for the effort I’d put in and the personal progress I’d made, but I didn’t get one, because the truth is no one really gave a shit.
It took Insight nine months to recognise the fact that I was working as a programmer not a designer. I don’t know why it was so difficult. Other people seemed to get their job title changed at the drop of a hat (the marketing girl had her title changed to “web technologist”, whatever that meant), but I had to fight. I had to burst into tears and threaten loudly that I had no choice but to leave, that I was being screwed over by a company that was hollow, that didn’t stick to it’s own supposed “core values” of “total employee commitment.”
They had taken on and trained up a couple of supposed ASP developers and a DBA in the states, and these guys came back to the UK a couple of months after I had rewritten the system and joined my team. My team was two people up until then – me, still entitled “web designer,” and the DBA.
It doesn’t take five people to look after an intranet, let alone a section of an intranet. At the company I work with now, three people look after an entire website database, accounts system, and the IT demands, and the reason they can do this is because it is well designed. The programmers at Insight seemed intent on preserving their own obsolete little roles at the expense of the progress and efficiency of the company. I felt as though I was being forced out of the position that I’d earned by right, back into web design whilst they wrote poor quality code all over my hitherto efficient and easy to maintain system. I was using technology they had no skills in (which I had taught myself on the job without any help), and they, being lazy types who had been trained in the old system that I had done away with, really didn’t like me at all.
They didn’t talk to me. There was no attempt to get along. My first real conversation with one of the two ASP people consisted of an argument, because he didn’t understand how the system worked, and refused to read my documentation, claiming he couldn’t do his job because the user-functionality wasn’t there. It was there, in the documentation he refused to read. They were cold; they tried to shut me out of new projects, refused to work on my system because the technology was beyond them, and refused to work to the quality and standards required of them.
They were bad programmers. Not only did I have my own workload to look after, I had to check and debug everything they put on the system because I couldn’t trust them to do a good job. I got pretty tired of having to correct their elementary mistakes whilst listening to them whine to management about how hard their jobs were. They held back any further redevelopment on any of the rubbish old systems we looked after because they were simply too stubborn to learn anything new. What really stung me most was the knowledge that one of these developers was earning several thousand pounds more money than me.
Then everything changed. The company made a huge loss. They were made redundant, along with a third of the IT support department.
I was free to do what I really wanted, at last. I wanted to redevelop all of the systems in a technology called .NET. This had been tabled before, but I had refused to go along with it because I simply couldn’t trust my team to do a good job. Now I could really prove myself. I was desperate to shine. To be acknowledged and rewarded at last! To get the pay review I’d been waiting for since I’d joined Insight nearly two years before. Maybe I’d even get my “Operational Excellence” cube that proved I was actually a valued member of IT/IS. If I could do this, I could do anything. I wouldn’t be confined to the reporting system and a few tools – maybe they’d let me work on other systems too, consult me on major projects, which I knew I was perfectly capable of designing. Other people were all too happy to sit and fester in dreadful, obsolete systems, but I was not. I wanted to see some efficiency. I hoped I could get involved in EDI and business to business communication, in valuable applications that would really make a difference to the every day life of the office support staff.
They needed a helpdesk ticketing system. I wanted to write it in .NET. They needed it fast, because as usual they’d screwed up. The licence for their current system – a system that left much to be desired – ran out in a month. I knew I could do it. I told them six weeks. Six weeks was fine, but I’d have to work hard – very hard.
I worked hard all right. I sat at my desk and worked constantly. I never moved from my desk. I forgot to move my legs. I forgot to get up and drink water. I’d wake from the spell of the VDU to discover half the day had gone, and my legs and backside felt numb and my throat felt raw. I may as well have been on an aeroplane.
I finished the project in five weeks and it was finally ready for testing when I left work on that Thursday night with the pain progressing up my leg and my calf muscles so solid it felt as if I was turning to stone. If this didn’t prove what I was worth, nothing ever would.
