My IT Career History | PART THREE
My original plan for this series was three videos: two about my history, then one offering advice for navigating a career in IT. However, after I wrote the post for part two and then edited the video, I realized that it was painfully long. I made the decision to break up the IT Career History into three parts, saving my advice video for the fourth part. Thus, here we are in the third and final part of my IT career history! Last week, we left off with me having just gotten let go from the "job" at a startup that was questionable at best. Let's pick up from there!
The Sun
Thankfully, I got another job just a couple of weeks later. I’m calling this section the sun as an allusion to Icarus because I feel like this is the point in my career when I flew too close to the sun. I very nearly doubled my income with this job and was making a little over six figures by the time I finally quit. This is the job that told me that money really isn’t everything and you need a work-life balance. I’d always known that work-life balance is important to me, but this job absolutely showed me what a priority it has to be, and that any job that causes you to sacrifice your personal life is not worth it.
This new position was unlike anything I’d ever had, before. I was the sole overnight IT guy for a large prescription fulfillment center. I had to wear many hats. Systems administrator, technical analyst, repair tech, domain administrator, SQL guru, C++ bug resolver, warehouse representative on conference calls… the list goes on. It was a lot of work. And, much like the previous job, there was very little documentation.
Unlike the previous job, I got overtime pay.
Which happened a lot.
Now, the reason that I say that this job was me flying too close to the sun is because of the amount of work and brainpower that it required. I worked my butt off every single day, for anywhere from twelve to fifteen hours a day, sometimes seven days a week. I would often end up sleeping at my desk because my shift ended at four in the morning but I needed to perform a weekend change starting at eight, so there was no point in going home. I also found myself doing the work of the maintenance team because… well, they just had absolutely no clue what they were doing and relied on me to do everything overnight. I heard that the day shift maintenance team was great and pretty much left IT alone, but at night I was doing their job and mine. It was a lot. It was too much.
I didn’t get a lot of overtime because I wanted to. I got a lot of overtime because I had to. Throughout the day, I would get paged over and over again by members of other teams who knew I was the sort of person who would just do their job for them rather than try to educate them on how to do it because I needed to take the fastest route toward a solution so that I could focus on my own work. I would then spend hours on never-ending phone calls with multiple vendors and other companies, struggling to juggle everything at once. I was bothered by other people over and over again and this meant that I had little to no time to do my work during my shift, which ultimately led to me staying late or coming in early just to catch up on what I hadn’t been able to do as a result of being bothered constantly.
On top of all of that, there were some people who worked in the other teams in overnights that I just did not like at all. They could be rude and nasty, several of them would voice some pretty awful opinions on anything from social issues to politics, and ultimately it was just a terribly toxic workplace, not to mention the fact that we had to come into the office during blizzards and I wasn’t allowed to take an unpaid lunch break—I had to always be available if someone needed me, and someone always needed me.
Even for close to $120,000 a year (counting my overtime) and five weeks of vacation pay, this wasn’t worth it. Not even close. One night, after suffering this place for a year and one month, I’d had it. I’d saved up enough money to quit and relax for a few months and someone did something that just sent me over the edge. It wasn’t one specific event, necessarily, it was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. Somebody paged me, told me they needed me to come and do their job for them, and I just couldn’t do it anymore.
I sent out an email saying that I had quit, I texted my manager, his manager, and his manager to tell them I was done, and I left. I just left. I couldn’t do it anymore.
Don’t get me wrong, here: this wasn’t some shocking event. It wasn’t surprising to anyone involved. I had talked to everyone about the problems I was experiencing and what could be done to solve them. I had proposed many solutions dozens of times and had even told them that I was intending to quit that spring if things didn’t go the way I needed them to go. I’d even had meetings with the IT director, my manager’s supervisor’s boss. I exhausted every option before I left. I do not feel the least bit guilty or regretful about my departure from that job—I know that I did the right thing and tried everything that I could to improve the situation before I left it entirely.
So I left, and I didn’t even look for another job. For three months, I exhausted my savings just trying to get my headspace right. I relaxed, I played D&D, I saw friends and family, and I just recovered from that hellscape. When I did start looking for another job, I told myself: never again. I’m going to be honest about what I want. If it’s a salary job with no overtime, I will make it clear I won’t work outside my normal hours. If it’s a job that has overtime pay, I’ll set boundaries for how much overtime I’m willing to take. And most importantly, it has to be a job that offers an outstanding work-life balance.
So the search began. Enter Zoom…
My Current Position
In February of 2020, I had three job offers on the table at once. One was from a company that I knew I was going to say no to—it just didn’t quite have what I wanted and wasn’t really the sort of company that I wanted to work for. The other two were enticing. One of them was Zoom, which was offering me unlimited time off and the possibility of occasional remote work, but was also about thirty minutes away, and the other was a company in downtown Kansas City. It had a great location, I’d met my future team and loved them, they were really serious about personal growth opportunities, offered solid work-life balance, and had stated that after a year of in-office work, I could go remote if I wanted and would just need to come in to perform physical changes on rare occasions. On top of that, they were offering me $15,000 more than Zoom.
Everything in me told me to go with this other company. It was a great location, I was guaranteed a 95% remote position, it was more money, I’d met and loved the team, there were growth opportunities, they cared about work-life balance, Glassdoor had lots of believable praise about them…
But I went with Zoom for one reason and one reason only: they were offering unlimited PTO and the other company was offering five weeks. Unlimited time off meant more opportunities for mental health days, time to focus on my own projects, and really just a more fulfilled life. That’s what I wanted, that’s what mattered to me. So I picked Zoom, and sent my regrets to the other company, thanking them for the opportunity.
That unlimited time off policy is gone, now, replaced with probably the worst PTO package I've had since I first started in IT, which definitely sucks. However, that PTO package is honestly counter to my general experience with Zoom. Zoom generally has a culture of care, and even uses the slogan "Zoom Cares" often (and to great effect). While the PTO policy doesn't really reflect that in my personal opinion, the company goes to great lengths in other areas to make sure that we aren't overburdened at work. I definitely feel like I can completely shut Zoom out of my mind the instant that I clock out. I feel no obligation to work out of my usual hours, other than occasional weekend shifts (which I can easily trade).
Did I make the right choice when I chose Zoom over the other company? I don't know. I came to Zoom for one reason and that reason is gone, but I've discovered other positive sides to working for this company. My work-life balance is pretty solid, here--probably the best that I've ever had--other than the fact that I cannot take much time off from work. However, if my one complaint about my current position is that the PTO policy kinda sucks, then it can't be that bad.
There are plenty of positives to Zoom and it generally follows its policy of caring about employees quite well--impressively well, to be honest. I still recommend it to people who are looking for a decent job, just with the caveat that they should be prepared to take some unpaid time off in conjunction with their paid time off, and should factor that into their consideration of a position (and their starting salary demands). The PTO policy is really an outlier with the rest of Zoom's policy, so I'd say things are pretty good from an employee standpoint.
Conclusion
And there you have it, my complete IT career history. That was a lot more than I thought it was going to be. I didn’t expect to go so in-depth when I first started this series, but I guess that I just had more to say about these companies than I originally expected. I tried to be as fair as possible, but honesty definitely trumps what is “fair”, when it comes to careers. More people need to be honest and open about their experiences with their careers and positions at various companies. Hopefully, it helps encourage companies to do better and improve their culture. I’d love to see those improvements made.
I have one more post planned for this series, which will be coming out next Friday. I’ll be reflecting on all of these jobs I’ve described here so that I can deliver a few tips that I have for navigating your own career and making the most of it. They’ll be lessons I’ve learned from my own mistakes so that, hopefully, you don’t have to make the same missteps that I did. If you want to make sure you see that post when it comes out, the best way to do that is to follow me on social media and subscribe to my YouTube channel! I’m @TLBainter on most social media platforms and will have links for all my profiles at the bottom of this post!
Until next time… bye!