Ouch!
Dental discounts in the Philippines are virtually unheard of unless the dentist is your relative. And even then you only get a discount on services, not on parts. However, dental hygiene seems to be taking a back seat to dental reconstruction, and quite a few dentists are now also into reconstruction and beautification. I seem to see more and more kids wearing braces than I did several years back, and gone is the belief that only kids with pliable gums can benefit from braces. Apparently adults in their twenties and older can too.
Double-time
It’s a manager’s nightmare, when a team member leaves just when clients are coming in and bringing more work our way. I for one do not blame people for looking for greener pastures (LGP, as opposed to Looking for Better Management- LBM). But for one to abandon ship just when things are definitely picking up, well … there’s really not much I can do about that except look for a replacement.
I’m not looking for some top-notch developer with code coming out of his ears. I want someone teachable, a fast learner and not averse to a night or two nights of overtime (with free dinner) in a month. But the pattern we seem to have reached at our workplace is everyone wants to join the tech group, and no one wants web development.
I’m not sure if it’s because of the non-challenge. My brand of web development is to create something attractive with a backend that the client cannot destroy. That means Joomla / WordPress and a good designer and a php coder. My brand of web development is to make it as easy for the client to maintain his site, with the minimum of help from us, so we can pick up and do other things.
I did get to interview a couple of guys, with two more perhaps next week (if they show up, because some of them email back and then do not show up). But until then the workload of the guy who left rests squarely on my shoulders, and I am doing double time again.
All work and no blogging makes for a stressed out Bambit. I look like someone an insurance agent would hesitate to give a life insurance quote to.
Things that suck about being in IT
Tech Republic has recently relased another article under their Sanity Check series: Five things that suck about working in I.T.
As I read the TR list I realized that in the Philippine context, Jason Hiner’s list was in the wrong order. This is the list as it appears on the article on Tech Republic.
5. You get a lot of fingers pointed at you
4. People assume you’re an expert in all things tech
3. You have to continually re-train, on your own dime
2. The hours are long and irregular
1. The job market is tumultuous and in transition
Having been in the I.T. business since 1995 (and a professed computer addict 10 years prior to that) I would say that list is upside down, and so may I offer my explanations to the same list, reordered for the Philippine I.T. setting.
5. The job market is tumultuous and in transition – Yes there are a lot of I.T. jobs out there, but quite a few of them are now going into the contractual basis which means a lot of money for the contractor but not for the programmer/developer/technician. There is also the I.T. brain drain out to Singapore, which has claimed a number of our better developers and technical support engineers.
4. The hours are long and irregular - I.T. has always been synonymous with long working hours, this is not something new, however it is always bewailed and belabored, like the habit of beating a dead horse.
3. You have to continually re-train, on your own dime – This may be true in a lot of offices, but not where I work. The company I work for pays for our training and certification exams and gives us an increase in pay (increase, not bonus) when we pass. Workers in other companies are not as fortunate.
2. People assume you’re an expert in all things tech – This is probably the most misunderstood aspect of I.T. totally incomprehensible to non-I.T. beings. Everyone assumes that just because I can make a website I can also fix their motherboards and its popped ic’s and their hard disks that have crashed without any backups, and even fix their kitchen sinks as well. I can’t. They think a programmer knows the same thing as a technical support engineer and are interchangeable. They’re not. There are times when I really feel like wearing one of the classic ThinkGeek shirts that say “No, I will not fix your computer.” (I can, actually, but I don’t wanna.)
1. You get a lot of fingers pointed at you – Yeah, but when something goes wrong with the machine all fingers are pointed at the I.T. guy. Case in point: ISP decides to change the IP address assigned to a company’s server “just for the heck of it” without telling anyone. As a result, no mail comes in or goes out. We come in and reconfigure the firewall to accommodate the new IP address, and the general manager (who in our case 9 out of 10 is an expat) is screaming expletives at us when he actually should have been screaming at the ISP. He doesn’t know or care about the difference. Tough, but hey, we get a lot of that, and it has made us stronger.
An Old friend
I had forgotten so many things about my previous life, whether purposefully or just because of brain cells that have long expired. But in my feeble mind’s effort to leave the past behind it had also erased some of the wistful memories that I should have kept. The kind that when someone reminds you of it you absolutely do not remember, and even deny ever happening. Then it comes back to you, gently but constantly as a sudden drizzle on a summer morning.
About Me
