How's work been?

It could be that the salary plus benefits for B outweigh the salary plus benefits for A. Also, continue to consider the intangibles like added stress.

I would tell Company A you will let them know after the weekend. Then tell Company B you are very interested but you have another offer you are going to accept on Monday afternoon if you haven't heard back from them. Maybe even call up that boss for the alternative position at B and tell them you are tired of waiting for the original and ask what they have for you and if it sounds good ask how quickly they can make an offer.

Chances are B will keep dragging their feet and you should accept A's offer on Monday. Set your start date 2-3 weeks from now and if B does come back and blows you away with their offer, then you can decide how important it is to you to keep your commitment to A.

That's kind of where I'm at.

I've reached out to B and let them know I have a firm offer, that my preference remains B but have also told them I'm on a deadline for responding to A.

I am planning on taking A's offer. It'd be irresponsible to not take the opportunity (for me and my family's future) on the hope that B comes through. If B does blow me away before my start date (I could see this happening) I will have a hard choice on my hands.

I don't need things to be perfect, I just need to be in a positive culture with room to grow and advance (why I'm leaving my current post).

It's good that you've thought about it and sorted out your options. Solid planning sir.

Thanks Robear.

Big boss at B reached out and we talk this weekend. I read that as them being interested in closing the deal.

Will see...

I've rarely seen that level of f*ckery from a vendor before. It's almost funny.

The project manager last week was saying that there was the possibility of the project being cancelled at the 11th hour. At this point, I don't think this would surprise me and, to be perfectly honest, my contract is almost up anyway, so I don't think I'd mind, I've already been paid anyway.

For the first time in almost twenty years, I started a new job today.

I can't remember the last time I felt this useless! I mean, what's an IT worker without an admin account and knowing where to use it?! It was downright criminal how little I accomplished today.

On the flip side -- everyone was super stoked to have me aboard and made me feel absolutely welcome. Pretty sure this is going to be awesome!

LilCodger wrote:

For the first time in almost twenty years, I started a new job today.

I can't remember the last time I felt this useless! I mean, what's an IT worker without an admin account and knowing where to use it?! It was downright criminal how little I accomplished today.

On the flip side -- everyone was super stoked to have me aboard and made me feel absolutely welcome. Pretty sure this is going to be awesome!

Congrats on the new job! The fact that everyone made the effort to make you feel welcome says a lot. It's always easy to do nothing. Honest welcoming is gold.

Top_Shelf wrote:

Thanks Robear.

Big boss at B reached out and we talk this weekend. I read that as them being interested in closing the deal.

Will see...

How did it go, Top?

I can't remember the last time I felt this useless! I mean, what's an IT worker without an admin account and knowing where to use it?! It was downright criminal how little I accomplished today.

I worked at a place for 5 weeks that wouldn't give me admin rights because they got screwed by the IT guy I replaced. I really don't know how you are supposed to be able to do anything other than hand out mice and batteries?
edit: Grats on the new job!

LeapingGnome wrote:
Top_Shelf wrote:

Thanks Robear.

Big boss at B reached out and we talk this weekend. I read that as them being interested in closing the deal.

Will see...

How did it go, Top?

Talked to Big Boss on Sat. Feels like a great match. Big Boss knows my deadline and said they'd do everything they can to get me an offer early this week, including pushing over the weekend.

I've got the 24 clock ticking in my head.

Nice Top_Shelf!
I guess we are going to have to put you on a topper shelf. (more toply shelf? topier?))

Lol.

The_Toppest.

But they still have to get the ball into the end zone.

fangblackbone wrote:

I worked at a place for 5 weeks that wouldn't give me admin rights because they got screwed by the IT guy I replaced.

While not the "cause" here -- just company bureaucracy -- I'm learning that I too am replacing the "guy who knew everything and screwed the company." The last two days have been full of me commenting on issues around me and watching my coworkers' eyeballs grow big. "Would you mind if I included you in this project?"

B couldn't come through in time (sounds like this is happening across all the big consulting firms). Am taking A.

Excited!

On a separate note, I appreciate this community so much. Thanks all for your perspective and comments. I found them helpful.

Woot! I hope it's as good a situation as it appears! Think of us while you are swimming in your money vault.

Congrats! I am glad you went with the bird in the hand and didn't get stuck.

bobbywatson wrote:

I've rarely seen that level of f*ckery from a vendor before. It's almost funny.

The project manager last week was saying that there was the possibility of the project being cancelled at the 11th hour. At this point, I don't think this would surprise me and, to be perfectly honest, my contract is almost up anyway, so I don't think I'd mind, I've already been paid anyway.

Project manager this week: We're going live on Monday, guys. Get ready, it's going to be a sh*tshow!

So they are allowing drinking at work now, right?

Vrikk wrote:

So they are allowing drinking at work now, right?

Even if they did, I don't drink

bobbywatson wrote:
Vrikk wrote:

So they are allowing drinking at work now, right?

Even if they did, I don't drink :(

No to worry; we’ll drink for you.

bobbywatson wrote:

I've rarely seen that level of f*ckery from a vendor before. It's almost funny.

Project has been live for a bit more than two weeks. Wasn't too bad, until yesterday afternoon. I was looking at yesterday's logs this morning, and noticed that, a bit after 1 PM, there were A LOT! of errors with various things. We had seen those errors before (missing PO line numbers, wrong units of measure), but not on that scale.

Luckily, out of 100+ messages, only 11 were actually posted, because otherwise it would have been quite hard to undo the damage...

Turns out somebody from the vendor pushed code to prod instead of test. That code was (obviously) untested, and was populating all external references with random numbers.

I have... an interesting problem.

I got unofficially offered a higher position in the company I work for, which would likely not change my work terribly much, but I'd imagine would come with a decent pay bump. Right now I configure linux servers for a company that operates like an IaaS. Instead of installing and configuring the software for our clients (which is mostly cookie-cutter and most of the process is automated enough that the average person could do it with a bit of training), I'd be installing and configuring a different type of server for use in our datacenters. It's more demanding, more responsibility, I'd learn quite a bit more, and I'm pretty good friends with the other guy that's currently doing this work.

Here's the rub though. The guy that quit this job a few months ago was not exactly quiet about why he quit. He quit because he couldn't stand how micromanaged he felt by the general manager of the company and the VP of technology. The VP sticks his hands in almost every aspect of the company and almost always pisses someone off when he does so. The last time he pissed us off was jumping in at the end of one of my builds, as I was passing it to a different department for further configuration, to ask why we were sending the equipment. As in, he skipped past the sales team that sold the deal, the sales architects who designed the solution, the project manager that wrote my ticket, past my entire management line, to give me sh*t about the build. I got a ticket, I built the equipment for shipment. Why it was only part of the order is not my problem, but he expected me to know all the other moving parts of this build and answer him about it.

The GM is the wife of one of the founding members of the company, and while she's proficient, she also micromanages and meddles a lot, and on top of that she's extremely volatile. She can be sweet in one moment, and literally yelling at people (IE, to the point where HR has to get involved) the next. I've seen her absolutely ream out her husband in an engineering meeting and it was one of the most awkward moments of my professional career. Early on in my employment she reamed me out for something I still feel was rather stupid, and since then I've basically just avoided her as much as possible. My boss had to put an HR complaint on her last year for yelling (and I mean damn near screaming) at us because we were busy getting an international shipment to a major client on a truck, instead of sorting out a lunch order for her team that was scheduled to be delivered the next day. That resulted in my boss not having anything to do with ordering food anymore, as she shouldn't have been doing it as long as she was, and it now falls to HR to sort out.

So I have this amazing opportunity in front of me, that would help me grow professionally, look great on my resume, I'd enjoy the work, and I'd make more money, my desk would literally only move one room over... and I'm almost certainly going to turn it down because I know I'll end up quitting because of two people who have almost nothing to do with the job.

Once all the background checks are done, I convert from contract employee to FTE!!!!

@PurEvil I know this isn't the first time you've brought up issues with your companies culture. If I were in your shoes I would be looking at taking that job to try and quickly build the skill set to jump ship to somewhere else. Not sure how long that would take but you'd have to be able to stomach their horsesh*t until then.

Well that's the funny thing. In my current position I'm fine. Outside of being annoying, we have a lot of power to keep them out of our (my current team's) daily routine and have been pushing back hard over the past year to the point where I have almost no interactions with them at the moment. We don't fall under them anymore, and the person we do fall under is awesome and has told us she has no problem telling them to stay in their lanes and leave us alone.

So I make decent money, in a job where I have very little stress, no customer interaction, very little interaction with anyone higher than my direct supervisor, no time tracking, extremely flexible schedule, really nothing of a commute, actual unlimited PTO, and this would continue basically indefinitely. The only downside to my current job is that it is the absolute definition of dead end. There is no upward movement, for me to make more money I either wait for raises or I take another position. The culture of the upper echelon of the company can be really toxic, but I almost completely avoid it in my current position outside of some annoying messages on Slack. Taking the promotion would be taking a giant leap into it though.

I'm taking steps to finally go back to school and get a degree, UMGC has a cybersecurity technology degree that would probably boost my resume up quite a bit, and all the courses basically fall along my current experience, so it'd probably be easy to just blow through them. And even before this opportunity my thought was always that I'd rather not move up in this company and deal with people higher up, they are literally toxic to the point where I'd rather take my chances with the devil I don't know. I think I just hate that it would be an amazing opportunity if I the culture of it weren't so terrible for me.

On the flip side, what I think I'm going to do is ask to be cross-trained for a modest bonus so I can help take a big chunk of the work load off the current guy, while not actually taking the position. There are three of us on my current team, and I might have done 20 hours worth of work in the past 6 months. Not exaggerating... it's been dead around here. I spend most days watching Youtube, surfing Reddit, or reading books. The other guy is over there with 40 hours worth of work to do every day. In that way, I could get the experience, get the training, boost my resume, but still remain pretty isolated from all the bullsh*t. I just worry that even dipping my toes in this way I'll get dragged into it. I plan to talk with the director that asked for me early next week, he hates those two people too so I know he'll understand my concerns.

Purevil, there's a basic principle of both management and leadership that you should never give responsibility without authority (and you should never accept the first if you are not given the latter). Simply make it a stipulation of the change that you have *authority* over the work you are *responsible* for. The buck stops with you and no one else is expected or allowed to jump in and make changes or "help" unless you specifically request their intervention.

Otherwise, it's a poison pill waiting to be eaten. The days of "You'll do what I say, mister, like it or lump it!" have been replaced with "Here's what we need; I trust you and your team to get it done efficiently". If that is not the case where you work, either you explicitly, in writing, make it happen, or nope out. Clearly the status quo is untenable in the new position.

Bosses doing technical stuff and micro-ing people is part of a startup phase, and not the behavior of a successful, stable company that is able to scale as needed. Processes should at this point be more important than individuals. Again, if that is not true, that should be a goal of yours in the new role.

Also, cyber security is incredibly lucrative, and will be as long as the labor shortage exists. Even the increasingly automated tools need to be wrangled and monitored, and incident responses need to be overseen. What you will find, though, is that the hours can be brutal (my friends who do it have all been on rolling shifts because it's hard to hire someone exclusively for night-time shifts, with this skill set). It can also be repetitive and boring, but with moments of sheer excitement and fear.

I'd look at that, or AI/ML if you are okay with coding tools, or data science (again, you'd need a good practical math and statistics background as well as working with databases, storage, data pipeline architecture and the like).

I'm not sure I'd actually want to go into cyber security, to be honest. I'm not entirely sure what I want to ultimately do. The degree I'm looking at has a bit of security pushed towards the end, but the reason it's appealing is that it goes through networking, Linux, cloud services, and then mixes in security (pen testing, forensics, etc) on the other side of all that. I don't think I'd really struggle with it, and it'd look good on a resume.

Bosses doing technical stuff and micro-ing people is part of a startup phase, and not the behavior of a successful, stable company that is able to scale as needed.

Definitely agree with this. This company started as a startup and parts of it still operate in that manner. I've been lucky that since I've been here I've just made whatever change I felt our department needed instead of continuing to try to involve those two. This led to our department being one person able to do a maximum of 6 installs per day, with crappy boxes and handwritten stickers on the box for customers, to 3 people able to (in a perfect world) do a max of around 100 installs per day, with crisp boxes, printed company logos, paper tape making it look professional, etc. Scaling up made it so that even when we only have a few builds, we're so efficient at getting them out the door that we mostly just goof off now. For example, my boss is over at her desk at the moment trying to figure out how to build her ARK server into a cluster of 2 instances, so I've been helping her with that today.

I also designed the warehouse layout, bought safety equipment and processes to prevent injuries, optimized part of our build process, and I'm normally the technical lead in terms of repairing old equipment to refurbish. We recently had an equipment shortage and by the time upper management realized how f*cked we were, I'd already implemented a system to repair a lot of older systems to get us through... I'd even already ordered the parts and had them ready.

I think before I make a decision I need to find what the pay increase actually is. If it were something like 5-10% over what I make now it's an easy pass, but if it were something like a 50% increase, it might push me towards taking it.

You're thinking the right way. But I'm serious. Either you set those boundaries or you will end up crashing and burning. :-/

Having been teaching English for 16 years now, four times longer than my previous longest position (which was IT), I'm definitely well past the realization that having something low(er) stress that pays the bills is far more valuable to me than being on the corporate treadmill. Of course, everyone has their own situation so I know it may be necessary to boost your income or prepare yourself in case your position and job skills suddenly become redundant.