| The 40 In 40 Days Project. | ||
|
35. The Professional Rut (1989-96) |
||
|
The Au Pairs |
Having drifted
into a career in IT, I was starting to show signs of distinct promise.
At County Hall, where I had joined as a junior programmer in 1986, we
had recently changed mainframes and introduced a new database and
programming language. Motivated by a fervent desire never to work with
COBOL again, I was first off the blocks with the new technology, and had
soon gained expert status amongst my fellow systems developers. As a
result, I was invited to join the fledgling database team, as a database
administrator. My role would involve supervising the entire development
lifecycle, devising and implementing standards, giving design advice to
analysts and programmers, monitoring and tuning the databases for
maximum efficiency, installing new releases of software and generally
troubleshooting wherever it was needed. I saw this as a major career
advancement, and jumped at the opportunity. My star was in the
ascendant. What I hadn’t foreseen was that I was
in fact entirely unsuited to my new role. My strengths lay in building
new software – in translating business requirements into efficient,
logical code. This new job, on the other hand, gave me little scope for
creativity. I was more of an engineer, policeman and glorified knob
twiddler, whose job was essentially to administer the creative efforts
of others, and to perpetuate the status quo on the mainframe. The
trouble was, I couldn’t summon up any enthusiasm for finding out just
how many different knobs there were, what they all did, how often I
should twiddle them, and to what extent they should be twiddled. Boredom
blended with bewilderment. I was out of my depth, without the slightest
desire to learn how to swim. In hindsight, the obvious solution
would have been to move back to systems development, where I was
happiest. However, this felt to me like it would have been some sort of
climbdown – an admission of failure. I had grown up with a very
hierarchical view of the world, based on clearly defined levels of
status. This was, of course, a distorted view. Nevertheless, I felt that
my only option was to stick it out, marooned on this supposedly elevated
plane of existence. I stayed in that role for just over
seven years. Its effect on my self-worth was pretty devastating. I felt
useless, knew full well that I was underachieving, but still refused
point blank to do anything about it. Meanwhile, the status of local
government workers was being constantly eroded by cuts, sell-offs and a
steady erosion of morale – indeed, the very notion of public service
was under attack (and still is). County Hall had become a place of
bitterness, resentment, defeatism and general bad attitude, and I was as
bad as any. Eventually, I realised that I could no longer carry on like this. I had lost my sense of professional distance, and was by now bringing my emotions all too visibly into the workplace. I was letting myself down badly, and publicly. After a series of disastrous interviews with other companies for database administration jobs which I didn’t even want, I came to my senses and moved back into systems development at County Hall. It was no demotion – I even kept the same salary. I was handed the most complex, convoluted, ill-conceived, bug-ridden, shoddily designed system of them all – widely perceived as beyond repair, an embarrassment to the IT division, a poisoned chalice. Over the next two and a half years, I turned the whole system around, made it work, and left it in a state where people not only had confidence in it, but were planning further investments in it. I adored working on that system – it gave me a chance to prove myself all over again. It left me re-motivated, my sense of self-worth and professionalism restored, and with marketable skills once again. Thus, after twelve years in the cosy, gently stagnating prison of local government, I finally felt able to break free, and to try my hand in the big, bad world of the private sector. |