THE NEGATIVE REACTION

Remember in my last post how I thought I had made the right decision to move to the maintenance team? Well, that was pretty short lived. In the span of three weeks I've went from thinking it was a great move, to one of the worst career choices I ever made. But I'm a fighter, and I always get up after I've been knocked down. In the end, it wasn't me who quit, it was my team lead, who felt it necessary to call off the wolves once and for all.

PLENTY OF BLAME TO GO AROUND

Several things occurred which compounded the problem. I'm not going to say it was everybody else's fault, but there's plenty of blame to go around for sure.

1) No training. Don't know how this happened. I've had several positions within this company and every time I've had training. I'm puzzled why my team lead didn't think I needed training. Surely there were things I should know - right? In any case, I wasn't trained at all. My team lead basically said, "Here's your queue, here's your accounts, go to work."

2) No discussion about the accounts. Had I known the Northeast region was as high maintenance as they were, I probably would have asked for a different region. In fact, everybody on the team wondered why I was given the toughest region and many of the developers who had been dealing with these accounts were given different territories. I'm still puzzled about this decision.

3) No ramp up period. Most of the times when you get a new position with goals, you're given a "ramp up" period to get you familiar with the processes so you can ease your way into being comfortable with your goals. There was no ramp up period. I was given full goals to begin with - again, with no training and no other discussion. I have no idea why this happened. I think my team lead was given his goals and when the new project was rolled out, he was told the team needs to hit their goals. Unfortunately, he couldn't give me a break on my goals since he was already getting pressure from management to make sure the team hit their goals.

4) We took 100% responsibility. I will never know completely, but it seemed like we were taking 100% responsibility for the errors. The AM's never seemed to be accountable for their errors, yet I was constantly inundated with emails and tickets complaining about the accuracy of the work I did. This was probably the toughest pill to swallow since the AM's flat out refused to take responsibility for any of their actions.

Along with this, I'm working way too fast to make sure I keep up with my goals. My work got sloppy and I started getting tickets back from AM's. Issues were compounded by the AM's writing poor, inaccurate, and often times confusing tickets. As a former AM, it was REALLY frustrating to think people were actually this stupid. But time and again, the AM's either didn't read their email's or the ticket's, or just simply disregarded what I had put in the ticket as a response, a nd laid all the blame on me.

LOOKING AHEAD

I've always been a firm believer in destiny and feel if this was meant to be, the proper steps would've been taken to insure I was successful. It didn't happen, and I have to move on. I'm not going to stay on the development team. There have been too many changes and too much micro management. For some weird reason, I'm actually happy about it, since I feel like I have more opportunities to explore now as opposed to having to stay in maintenance for a set period of time. I've also been looking at moving from Thomson to another company, which is also strange for me since I've been here for almost 5 year now.

Either way, it's a win/win situation for me.