THE NEGATIVE REACTION

When I started as a developer two years ago, I thought I had the world by the balls. I had moved down from being an account manager (considered a lowly position by the developers) and now was working with who I thought of as some of the smartest, sharpest people I knew. Where people came to me to ask about software and firefox plugins when I was an AM, these people were writing grease monkey scripts for Firefox. I was excited, and every day seemed to be a seemingly fascinating journey to learn the process of taking a website's content and integrating with the design. It was more or less a straight forward process, but after a few months of having fairly low goals, I was rocketed into full quota. By then, I had figured out the process, I was developing more and more shortcuts and was ripping out two to three sites a day. My all time best was integrating 12 sites in a single week.

Some months were harder than others, and I did run into some tough sites and a few months I came close to missing my goal, but I never did. In a full year, I went 12 for 12 and was at 100% for every month.

At this same time, we had a "collaboration room" built on our floor. Complete with a Nintendo WII and big screen TV. It seemed everybody had a surplus of free time. People were hanging out in the Collab room, chatting away, playing the WII, watching tv and generally having a great time. At the time, me and two other developers would play Tiger Woods once a day. 9 holes minimum, somtimes 18. And still, I continued to hit my goal month in and month out.

At the same time, people were constantly working to improve the company. Ideas for better collaboration, better relationships between teams, and most people I knew were always looking for ways to improve the company. We had free time to explore our ideas and have managment help us bring these to fruition. It was a pancea and people were knocking our doors down to get in.

THE TRANSITION

There were several factors which has lead to where we are now. First, we moved to a new platform, which would merge our two roles of integration and front end development. Over the next months, we would only have one development role. It would be awesome, you would be able to cut, code and integrate the site as one task, instead of two tasks. It was going to reduce our turn times exponentially. The funny part is it had been in development for the better part of 7 years (depending on who you spoke with) and had stalled and now the finance people were threatening to pull the plug if it didn't get finished. Needless to say, they got it done and then we started a transition period of combining the two roles. Everything, it seemed, was going to get easier.

And then. . . the housing market crashed, the economy tanked, and things started to change.


THE "PRODUCTION PUSH" WHICH NEVER STOPPED.

In July we were told we're in a "production push" which meant goals were going to be raised and production needed to increase for varioud reasons. No problem, goals were increased, and we handled the incoming work fairly easily. As the months progressed, we continued to miss the "company goals" but every month we were handling the incoming work. It seemed that no matter how high the goals went, we never had enough work to hit our company goals. STrange as it seems, goals were never reduced or made to compensate for the lack of incoming work. Soon, Summer turned to Fall. and Fall into Winter. Goals continued to say high, and people were working hard to hit their goals. Having only learned CSS for six months, I was put on full goal, which started at 18 istes/month in the summer and ended at 21 sites/month by the end of the year.

So what happened?

I missed three months the whole year and by the time December rolled around, I realized the whole offic eenvironment had changed. Many of the people I saw on a regular basis I didn't see as much. People were either taking really short lunches or no lunch at all. The office haad gone quiet and you could tell things had changed.

The realization it was different came in late December when I spoke to someone on another team. He assured me, "Trust me, it's shitty EVERYWHERE man. People are dropping out, and I'm not talking about the regular people. I'm talking managers, team leads, people in senior positions. Right now it sucks everywhere. Make no mistake, you're not alone." It was a wake up call. But it was about to get even worse. .

THE END OF THE LINE. . .

From July until December, we were on a production push for six straight months. Goals went up practically every month regardless of incoming business. This alone really made me think whoever was forcasting our business clearly did not know what they were doing. I mean, we've been doing this for years, how you can not determine how long it takes for an order to get from a sales person to our development team is pretty amazing. Every month we heard we were going to be overwhlemed and to be prepared and guess what? Month in and month out we always stayed ahead of the orders. And yet, the goals continued to increase. By the end of the year, we worked out asses off and blew out the business we had. Oh sure, we didn't hit the "company" goals, but we more than blew out the site they put in front of us.

Remember the whole time, we never heard from the management team or the executive committee they were proud of our ability to tackle the challenges they put in front of us. No celebration, no pat on the back, NOTHING, ZERO, NADA.

Fast forward to the first week in January. I was on my way to Maintenance, off the development team and it sounds as if I've made the right decision. The first development team meeting of the new year starts and not even ten minutes in our team lead is telling us our goals are going UP - A G A I N. Now our developers are going to be responsible to get out 6 sites a week. Once again, no pat on the back, no thanks for the great work, no nothing. After talking to people after the meeting many were still in disbelief. Many people echoed the same thing, "We worked our asses off for six months and the reward is having our goals increased? What a load of shit."
As if we didn't more bad news, it came in the form of an email a short time later. In short it read:

"The economy sucks, which means you're not getting your merit increase".

Fucking great. Just in case we weren't already feeling like shit, the very next email was from our CEO which stated:

"Great news, we just bought another multi-million dollar company."

Funny, the details of the deal were not disclosed for fear of a full on fucking mutiny I'm sure.

Once again, the company turned the dagger in. I'm not sure how much longer people are going to put up with this bullshit - but we'll see. Because you know it's a bad economy, and people would kill to have our jobs - right? Right.

One last bonus - I was planning on going back to school to get a masters in information systems management. My manager put the kybosh on that since there's a "freeze" on tuition reimbursement right now. My only way out has now been snubbed out.

I just told myself this morning, "Better buckle up princess, it's going to be a rough ride."


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