Under New Management
Here in the Information Technology W2 Labor Camp, I have a new manager. One of my old managers literally died and another—the guy in charge of hiring me—quit. This leaves me with this new manager. He has quite an impressive track record—I believe he is credited with creating the initial Web presence for E*TRADE and he also had a bout with Intuit among other stuff…
My first impression of the guy is summarized by the question, ‘Why there should be an impression by him in the first place?’ When you put E*TRADE on the map, I assume that you become independently wealthy—and there is no need to become a middle manager for a university medical center’s IT department. Either I am profoundly ignorant of how the “big time” IT biz works, this guy is a poor money manager or times are really, really hard.
The second impression of this guy is his 8:45 morning checkpoint meetings. There was a Blog about this earlier. These meetings have netted me a parking ticket and I have become a morning person. One out of two is not bad. I am called to these meetings so that I can listen in and “get up to speed.” This guy has clearly communicated to me that these meetings are to help me—there is little I can offer in reciprocation. This is probably because I am a “Microsoft guy” and this manager guy uses “the best tool” for the job (this is his technology plan almost verbatim). The implication here is that Microsoft servers including SQL Server and IIS are “probably” not the best tools for any “major” jobs in the near future. I came away with this implication because of this guy’s experience with Intuit.
He laughingly told me that Intuit wasted over eight million dollars not listening to this guy and went ahead with a Microsoft-based solution against his wishes. I assume that this took place sometime in the 1990s and he has not looked into Microsoft technologies—beyond Outlook and maybe Exchange server—since… So now, he wants to “help” me—to “encourage” me to learn Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition, Java Server Pages, maybe Tomcat on Linux and other non-Microsoft stuff—because “real” developers know more than one platform. Why doesn’t he know about what Microsoft is offering these days? Why are is criticisms of Microsoft out of date? Does not he “know” more than one platform?
Whatever the innuendo and politics, the short-term looks like this: profit from my experience with Microsoft tools or become a beginning programmer in Java and navigate the rugged political landscape surrounding a programmer in training. I will not pretend that American business invests in labor for the long term. I will assume that American business exploits labor for the short term. In order for me to be optimized for exploitation, my Microsoft experience must be burned off now! Either this will happen under ‘new management’ or maybe I should go back to contracting.