A trumwill to English translator:
trumwill says: Are you sure that’s a good idea?
trumwill means: Are you crazy?
trumwill says: I’m concerned about the mental stability of Dr. Yamagura
trumwill means: Yamagura is nuts.
trumwill says: You’re pretty stable at your current job.
trumwill means: Do you want your career to be at the mercy of a nutbar?
trumwill says: Well, if that’s what you want to do, I really hope it works out.
trumwill means: I’ll try really hard to refrain from saying “I told you so”, but no guarantees.
trumwill says: I’m sorry to hear that.
trumwill means: ITOLDYOUSOITOLDYOUSOITOLDYOUSO!!!!!!!!!
My friend Tony worked for the same law firm as their solo IT person for years. Because he lacked a college degree, he was always extremely underpaid. He manned 225 computers, wrote applications, mastered the HVAC, and handled all sorts of things for the lawsuit for barely half of market value. I wasn’t surprised that he wanted to leave, but when he finally got a significant raise I thought he’d stick around.
After he’d inadvertently gotten Julie fired from D-ko, there was a job opening. Julie’s got her former assistants a job at her new place of employment and when Dr. Yamagura hired another tech, she tracked him down and got him a job, too. Then Julie got a call from someone that she didn’t know. Apparently Yamagura mentioned during the job interview that he kept losing people to this other company because of the former employee and so the guy tracked her down and got a job with her. Eventually Yamagura turned to Tony and offered him a job.
I did what I could to talk Tony out of leaving while being supportive, but I was unsuccessful. He felt that he could do a better job than Julie did, with which I agreed, and that would prevent him from getting fired, with which I disagreed. There was also the matter of paychecks. Julie had six paychecks that bounced and almost lost her house. When she brought this up with him, he was angry at her for buying a house because that was going to detract from her work with D-ko. I tried as offhandedly as I could to bring these stories up, but he left anyway.
He managed to refill the staff with some friends, all of whom left good jobs, and when a fire broke out and took down the network, he and his entire staff were fired because he had not yet gotten a duplicate network set up off-site.
Interestingly enough, he doesn’t at all regret having left the job at the law firm and never inquired about getting his old job back. His former employer decided not to replace him, instead hiring an agency to take care of their needs as they arose. It was difficult to imagine a scenario in which a 225 computer network did not need a full-time IT person. I’d love to know how they manage that.I often joke that most of my employers are insane… but I think he’s the one person that has a leg up on me in that regard. I suspect that the law firm has since learned the error of their ways, but there’s no telling.
As for D-ko, it’s no longer in business at all. Maybe there’s something about doctors that go into business. I suppose it’s that a lot of them think they’re a lot smarter than they are and feel that since they mastered vet/dental/med school, they can just up and start a business and everything will work out. They also never like to have their decisions questioned even outside their area of expertise, which only increases the odds of failure. A former comic shop that I went to in Phillippi was owned by a dentist and had almost the exact same set of problems.
I exclude my wife from the arrogance tar, of course. I don’t suspect that she will ever have designs on starting a business other than her medical practice, but if she does she will have someone more business-oriented helping her. That much I’ll make sure of.
His former employer decided not to replace him, instead hiring an agency to take care of their needs as they arose. It was difficult to imagine a scenario in which a 225 computer network did not need a full-time IT person.
I can see the appeal of the agency, at least as a stopgap measure. It’s difficult to screen and hire people to do things you yourself know little about. So don’t know what to look for or what to ask the person. And you don’t know how to assess their performance. Lawyers, especially older ones, don’t tend to know a lot about technical matters.
Comment by Spungen — December 16, 2007 @ 1:32 pm
I think the solution here is to hire a single, full-time person through an agency. That way you have someone that knows what a resident IT person needs to know, but you can rely on the expertise of the agency in picking a person and if they’re not working out, they’re easier to let go. What the law firm did was instead hire an agency to send someone over whenever there’s a problem. That way you don’t have the continuity of a single technician, which is very, very important. I have to believe that by this point they’ve either hired someone full-time or have an employee of the agency stationed at their site.
What they did is a good idea if you have a small company that doesn’t justify 40 hours of IT work, but a fleet of 225 computers requires at least one, probably more. This is particularly true when data security is an issue, as it would be at a law firm. The rule of thumb where I’ve worked is that you have a single IT person for each 40 computers or so. I’ve worked at more tech-savvy places than a law firm, though, so they could get by on less.
Comment by trumwill — December 16, 2007 @ 3:22 pm