Brain Drain

denverpilot

denverpilot

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So what's the "last sign" you like to use before hunting for a new job when good people are jumping ship?

Heh. I ask because our top Windows Admin announced he's gone in 14 days, one of our middle level Security guys announced same, the systems are precarious in many ways and cracking a bit under growth driven by the new parent company... More people cracking than systems.

I hate it when good people leave. Sigh.

Just thought it'd make good PoA fodder.
 
Squash the little guys to make to make the big boys even more money.

Isn't that every big company's mission statement nowadays?
 
denverpilot said:
So what's the "last sign" you like to use before hunting for a new job when good people are jumping ship?
Click to expand...

It depends. In some cases the old "have a nice day yourself" salute would be appropriate.

Shouldn't say that though. My last employer treated me very well.
 
Never stop looking. Because really, as much as people love to work well together, to the company, you are a resource. When they need different or less resources, your boss will feel bad when he gives you walking papers. I have been on both ends, and seen when the boss got their papers not too long after the team.
 
An all-hands meeting when the company president tells you "the wrong people are leaving".
 
As Bill Parcells said of working in any capacity in the NFL "We're in the replacement business. At some point everybody here will be replaced, either because they left voluntarily or because they were no longer wanted or needed. Players, coaches, staff, everybody but the owner is in this category. If any of us think it's different, we're kidding ourselves."
 
Per Wayne's comment: no one is irreplacable.

When do you know? You just will.

Often it's when the retention payments run out & the great team you worked with leaves. Sometimes it's when the new owner walks in with a 10 pound "policies manual" and you have to read & follow it by Friday. Sometimes it's the changed culture & new approvals needed. Sometimes it's the realization that you aren't - and can't - move ahead because of the new bureaucratic structures, the competition, or folks with more seniority that were with the old company. Sometimes it's the sense of impending doom as systems become overloaded, maintenance is reduced, or capital is constrained and you know that YOU will either get blamed or have to clean up the mess with all the stress that entails.

Then again, it may be an opportunity for some to move up as others leave.

I've worked a lot of deals - culture & integration is the make/break, and it's one of the first things I look at in evaluating deals. I've seen companies create wonderful new cultures, and I've seen deals where 30% of the acquired staff ('people' business) leave in the first 18 months....
 
wsuffa said:
Sometimes it's the sense of impending doom as systems become overloaded, maintenance is reduced, or capital is constrained and you know that YOU will either get blamed or have to clean up the mess with all the stress that entails.
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Heh. That's close. The only difference is I don't care if I get blamed, and I always have the documentation to prove I attempted to fix it. Also helps to have a no-BS reputation with peers. The industry isn't big enough for the BS artists to get away with it for long.

Stress, I started giving that up many years ago. Probably one of the reasons people think I'm cool under fire when systems are crashing/down.

The honest truth is, I see it coming (sometimes years in advance), attempt to fix, get denied for whatever reason ...

And... as long as there's no one bleeding on the data center floor, I don't consider anything to do with a broken computer an "emergency". Let the young guys freak out. I did once. They do enough for all of us.

Sure, I'll hurry to fix it with appropriate restraint on making bad jokes about it too loudly, but it's just a computer. 10,000 users? Cool. Doesn't make the fix any faster.

That plan for a redundant system that I designed for you last year? You giving that any harder thought today, than back then?

How much you suppose will outage cost you? Is the outage cheaper than the redundant hardware? You already have me as salaried labor and I know how to build it.

Oh hey, sorry the last three ass-kissing Corporate System Architects who told you that you didn't need to build redundant systems didn't work out, by the way. Sorry to see them go. I got a lot of good naps in during their meetings.

Have we shut down that "Cloud" horsecrap they built yet? Yeah, it's hard to get a vendor twenty times your size to care if their service is degraded and killing your smaller business, I know. I told you to get SLAs with real penalties that would hurt them if they didn't perform.

Which company did they use this place as their stepping stone to get to again? They might be hiring when y'all dump me in a couple of quarters.

I'm not bitter. Nope. :) Ha.

Today was a typical example. Bad DNS design, passing queries for a customer's internal machines through two sets of forwarders to the single IP at the parent company that can get to the customer's private network and query their machines, over not just one, but two VPN/Private tunnels, gosh... You suppose those queries fail once in a while and everything onsite then caches the negative query?

Director calls, says "It happened again. Can you flush all the DNS servers?" Yup.

Do that. Not three minutes later Chicken Little (nice but excitable Jr. Helpdesk guy) IMs that the VPN concentrator has again run out of licenses because the HD had over 250 people not just go back to what they were doing once the DNS was fixed, but had them reboot without shutting down to save time. Hundreds of VPN sessions are hung and the VP wants to know if I can swing the DNS for Corporate VPN traffic to the other site to take some pressure off the overloaded VPN concentrator. Sure.

Type type type. Done.

VP sends out Corp-wide email to have everyone log out and back in.

Meanwhile changes in traffic and mass log off/login behavior is freaking out some other systems that move massive amounts of data around. No, they're not on their own network. Brought that up a while ago. No go.

Watch the errors and know that stuff will retry and fix itself on its own in about 10 minutes.

No one bleeding anymore. Go have a smoke and a pastrami sandwich.

Team meeting time. Two engineers quit. Great. Best Wimdows guy we have got a job 4 miles from his house. Security guy left to go to a hosting company across town where he will be an auditor instead of an auditee.

Boss calls second meeting impromptu. Tells us we're under a Class Action lawsuit and "Don't delete anything." Been there, done that, signed that Affadavit before. Yawn. Ask about automated log rotation. We don't have the disk space to keep everything and don't. He says no changes to existing procedures, just don't delete things. Yeah, I just randomly log into working systems and delete random stuff. Got it. LOL!

That was about half my day. What do ya think? ;)
 
Nate, you're making it too hard. When you don't want your job, your bosses job or his bosses job it's time to move on.
 
Nate, I'm not going to type it all here... but if you're really wondering, call me and I'll give you my "BS Gap" talk. I used to give it to the guys I managed (UNIX admins at a large online brokerage) when the market was a shambles, the industry was on the ropes and things looked really bad. Last I heard... it was still being used there, eight years after my own "BS Gap" closed up and I left.

I have a half written book on the subject I really should finish. maybe it would help pay for my airplane. :)
 
wabower said:
Nate, you're making it too hard. When you don't want your job, your bosses job or his bosses job it's time to move on.
Click to expand...

Ha. Succinct and to the point. We really must meet someday Wayne.

Bad news is, I haven't wanted my job my whole life. I'm just kinda partial to the paychecks. ;)

Boss' job? Had it at age 20-something. Chased that brass ring.

Yeah, I've read all that "follow your bliss" mullarkey. My bliss would not put me well above 95th percentile on income. I used to chase raises. Had a chip on my shoulder to prove an idiot with no degree could easily out earn most degreed engineers. Done. Goal completed.

Chased down work-from-home. Done. I go into the office sporadically every other week.

Now all I feel like chasing is vacation time. More and longer travels. See stuff other than a cubicle or my home office. Meet people.

Toyed with the idea of outfitting a camper with data toys and departing every other week for parts unknown, but drive time and needing to be online for five out of seven days kinda kills that idea.

Think also it would freak them out a bit if work from "home" was more than an hour drive from a data center since the week we are home is also our on-call week. Learned a long time ago not to be the bosses biggest pain in his ass. Just below it. Ha.

Same problem using the airplane to do it. May see what I can get away with for a few trips, but paying over $100/day to sit in a hotel room with the laptop seems pretty stupid. Free continental breakfast could be nice. Wouldn't have to make my own cereal or coffee in the morning. ;)

I'm a good little drone. It's kinda habit. Karen expressed a similar sentiment about herself last night during a discussion about why she wanted to accept a full-time offer when she has three part-time jobs and can set her own schedule. Habit, she said.

Part of the reassessment, of course, is dad passing away at 61. "Ok. Let's say you got exactly the same number of years, dummy. 20 left. You going to work on servers for millionaires for the rest of it, or are you going to get a life?", says Nate to himself.

Dad retired at 53 when his BS meter was pegged. Three years off work to do every project and thing he wanted to do and could afford. He has a ball. Got bored, back to retail electronics jobs with people he liked. Still had fun. Wasn't for the money. It was just his "play" money. Dead at 61.

Eight years doing what he wanted to do. 53 years going to a job. He loved Sales though. I don't know if I "love" computers the way they're used by business, but they've done good by me. I love new tech. No doubt about that. It was fun building the early Internet and ISP infrastructure. Not too impressed with what it became, though.

That was one of the draws to podcasting. Real content from real folks. But not interested in "monetizing" it via advertising.

Just kinda doing laps in the hold right now, deciding if I shoot the approach to something new or divert to safety.
 
denverpilot said:
That was about half my day. What do ya think? ;)
Click to expand...

Sounds a lot like most of my days. As far as the writing on the wall......I have said that once 1 of the 2 others (Operations Manager & Help Desk Manager) that seem to do or know anything in my IT Dept leave, I'm out the door shortly afterwards. I believe they have the same idea involving myself as well :(

I'm the "Technical Support Manager", I basically handle all Telecom, Desktop Support and IT Procurement as well as everything else that pops up that no one seems to have a clue about...
 
momalley said:
Sounds a lot like most of my days. As far as the writing on the wall......I have said that once 1 of the 2 others (Operations Manager & Help Desk Manager) that seem to do or know anything in my IT Dept leave, I'm out the door shortly afterwards. I believe they have the same idea involving myself as well :(

I'm the "Technical Support Manager", I basically handle all Telecom, Desktop Support and IT Procurement as well as everything else that pops up that no one seems to have a clue about...
Click to expand...

Good to hear. Haven't really run into anyone who's grass is truly greener on the other side.

Talked to the one Windows Engineer who left. He was actively recruited away to train and architect and he's always liked that. He has never been shy about saying that's what he wanted to do at our place. They didn't even give lip service to a path toward that for him, so he's gone. They did ask if they could match the offer if he'd stay. He said no. Smart. If they could match the offer and think he's worth it, they should have done it when he said he was interviewing six months ago.

He mentioned the start up he's going to does an IT training budget. 10% of base salary. I haven't seen that in at least a decade. Reminds me of the Dot Bomb days.

Similarly the company has no set time off. You need it and your work is done, you go. They interestingly were never concerned they couldn't measure performance to allow it. They were worried people wouldn't take enough.

Can't hire bumps on a log into those jobs with that policy, though. He's definitely not one. He's going to have a ball.

Well, right up until they do well and get acquired by a traditional company anyway. BTDT now what, um... Five or six times. It's fun while it lasts.

The other guy wanted to be the #2 Security guy and we hired back a former employee the #1 likes better. He thought he was a shoe-in. Gone. Guess it made him mad enough to go look and I know he needed the raise. Good for him.

Solid news is another guy is interviewing and wants out too. Not going to say who here in public but he's fairly critical path too. Ugh.

I think I'll just hunker down and let the storm blow for a while.

Today's meeting was about how cascading four levels of DNS forwarders over two MPLS circuits was a bad idea.

Design wasn't mine and the Operations folks went around the original design and did their own thing and it blew up.

No real surprise. Boring and stupid, actually. Piles of change control paperwork, but no real control.
 
denverpilot said:
Boss calls second meeting impromptu. Tells us we're under a Class Action lawsuit and "Don't delete anything." Been there, done that, signed that Affadavit before. Yawn. Ask about automated log rotation. We don't have the disk space to keep everything and don't. He says no changes to existing procedures, just don't delete things. Yeah, I just randomly log into working systems and delete random stuff. Got it. LOL!
Click to expand...

That's still better than a government anti-trust investigation order to archive EVERYTHING, including ALL email & web access until further notice. We don't care if you have to buy more storage, just COMPLY. All the email servers had to be physically moved & reconfigured over a single weekend.... good thing there was a corporate jet.
 
wsuffa said:
That's still better than a government anti-trust investigation order to archive EVERYTHING, including ALL email & web access until further notice. We don't care if you have to buy more storage, just COMPLY. All the email servers had to be physically moved & reconfigured over a single weekend.... good thing there was a corporate jet.
Click to expand...

Heh. Fun. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 loaded with magnetic media. ;)
 
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