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Good article. I am one of those 9:08am guys in a similar situation. I am the only one here that does IT, and I think I get caught in the more strict world of the manufacturing sector. People on time clocks, getting paid by hour, having to be at their job for the company to be efficient at making our products. I have been here for 8 years, and I get along and have good communication with all my co-workers that are in other job sectors. Most of the people here did not know how to use a computer when we first started building our network. I had to understand other peoples jobs starting at the age of 18 and how they would interact with the software needed per job title. Most of the supervisors and managers and sales employees have been here for 10-30 years and are much older than me. Alot has changed, as I was pretty humble my first few years and slowly gained respect of the old school workers. Ive had to work on a permission based budget for all IT related purchases, and all of the priorities are handled by my boss. He is the closest person who can change a password or fix some file permissions on his own but he is now the President of the company. While I was learning new programming languages or syntax for the constantly updating software and hardware and all that, I was going to college full time at night, commuting 30 miles one way, raising a baby along with maintaining my relationship with my new ex-wife and a few things most people my age achieve a little later than I did. Lately since the new ownership, my boss became president and the other part owner seem to be micromanaging things to an extent to where I am really considering trying to find another job. I stayed up one night trying to fix a configuration file that had been overwritten, I slept until noon, and came in. I apologized for being that late, and told them the circumstances, but after hearing my reasoning, it shifted to not notifying them I might be late. I do come in that late occasionally, but no one has ever said anything because It didn't matter to them that I wasn't here on time those days. I had a raise of .15 cents 2 years ago, and nothing since. I don't have "reviews" or anything. My salary per year is around 32,000 in the midwest in a metro area of around 300,000 people. Looking up the salaries on these IT websites and comparing them and combining the titles, it makes me sick how much other people make. It's kind of a motivator to find another job, but there is so much to know at this job, I don't think that I could train another person to do this. And if there is someone else that does take my spot i'm guessing they will be asking for a salary most likely double of what I have now. So i'm stuck between being loyal, and having a high morale for my job, and trying to find a reason not to find another job, among other things. I feel under appreciated and underpaid, even coming in late. I stay late sometimes and second shift is here, but it goes unnoticed. I am VPN'd from my home 24/7, If any service or server goes down my cell phone (personal) will blow up, along with alarms on my laptop (personal) 2 feet from my bed. If something is important before my hours of 9 to 5, they will get a hold of me and most of the time the issue can be handled remotely. Most things can wait until I arrive, like setting up cookies for salesmen fantasy sports websites, etc. Ive been a *nix user years before I got here at the age of 18. Im not a guru, but I have a majority of our services running on mainly linux for free. I mainly use debian now, as I'm just accustomed to using ssh to do my thing. I'd guess 80% of the things I do go completely unnoticed. I dont usually go to IT websites, but i was looking something up and stumbled across this article and it made me want to rant. (I'm usually pretty quiet and hopefully this helps by getting these issues off my chest) Anyways If I wasn't so busy, I would have time to break this rant into perfect grammar and in paragraph and in MLA style writing. So, I'll wrap this up.
But to answer the question, I dont think I would come back with strict rules unless the bond with other employees still existed and salary was better, and also not having to constantly worry about things being so micromanaged. If things are going to be micromanaged I want you to look at my .bash_history, or see all the code that I wrote, look at my login times, my web history of learning new things with my free time that will help the company, etc.
I think other people in IT probably have the same problems as I have, or not. Maybe its a lack of maturity or respect of THE unwritten rules. I wear a collared shirt, I don't have tattoo's or piercings, I dont look like a caveman or a gamer who has been up all night. I've been pretty stressed lately dealing with a divorce, selling real estate, spending time with my kids on my free time. But I didn't miss much work through all of that. I am trying to learn as much as I can and do as much as I can, but the cordiality or punctuality thing is just sensitive to some companies like mine.
Barely late and working 30 minutes late,
-rodpodimus
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