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Fred Baku: It Has Been 3 Weeks

Work Life | November 08, 2004 | 1 comments

It has been 3 weeks since I started my new job. The first week and a half I was working 10 to 12 hours a day and I wasn’t taking any lunch breaks. The problem is that we had a big deadline four days after I started. It is not like the deadline was unrealistic… it was very realistic if I started six weeks earlier like they initially planned.

I reached our deadline by the end of the fourth day. For the deadline I had to create a prototype of the application for the client. I found it easy to develop the prototype since on day 1 I was handed a stack of documentation including a screen and report design document to help me create the prototype. Almost everything I needed was in the documentation.

For the last week I have been chasing after different people to get my development environment setup so I could continue on to the next phase of the project. I am working for a pharma company and we have a lot of rules set by the FDA that we have to abide by that tend to slow us down but it is perfectly understandable considering peoples lives are at stake. So instead of it taking 30 minutes to install Oracle client is takes over a week due to the required validation of the application and documentation of the installation. My problem is not that it took so long but that even though the project manager asked for everything to be prepared for the team before we even joined the company nothing was done until I personally bribed people with beer. You figure there would be some kind of efficient process to get things setup for a large publicly traded company. I am starting to be convinced it is not how good you are but how many salesman you have on staff.

But this is not even why I sat down to write this. On Friday morning, like most days I was the first one in, a little while later one of the more senior guys on the other team came into the office with his breakfast and started up a conversation with me. A really nice guy… he sounds like he knows what he is doing and he seems to care.

He started to talk to me about the politics of working at the company and how he has been listening to my conversations with the client and watching how I work. He told me he was impressed with me but that I needed to be careful. It was not a good thing that I was excelling at my work. He said that either one of two things are going to happen if I continue like this. Either I am going to finish early and be fired because there is nothing left for me or people at head office won’t like me and try to get me fired because I am making them look bad. His suggestion to me was to slow down and just fit in… even if it meant not doing anything for a while.

He went on to tell me about how the last person working on his project got transfered because he was getting to close to the client and the client really liked him but the problem was that the project manager felt threatened so she had the guy transfered off the project. Wow… scary.

I told the guy that I wanted to excel. Not because I wanted to impress my boss but because it is just in my personality. I want to do my best, I want to improve, if you don’t push yourself you will never know how good you can be. His response to this was if you want to excel that this is not the place to do it, that I would need to start my own company to do that. That the real world would not let me excel.

I am not sure I like the real world. But now I know why people start their own companies. Not because of the need to be entrepreneurs but because they can’t find what they are looking for in the present business world. You give me a job that makes me happy and allows me to pay the bills. I won’t ever create a company that competes against you… why would I take the risk for absolutely no difference in reward?

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Comments

November 8, 2004 11:39 AM | ElvisIsGod commented:

Welcome to the real world.

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