the past few weeks have bee a bit insane, work has become progressively more crap than even i thought impact could possibly become. it seems as though the people who ‘get it’ and are trying to make things go as smoothly as possible are shat on, and it’s just not fair.

i had my annual (not that i’ve even had one yet… in 2 years) review not to long ago, and it was… well it was confrontational, absurd and ultimately made me realize that impact isn’t somewhere i want to be spending my time and effort anymore.

you see the problem is i was promised a review of my contract and salary upon return from railsconf, it was the only reason i was going to railsconf. for me it was recognition from my employer that the immense amount of effort and dedication i have put into impact over the past 2 years was going to be fairly rewarded (at this point i am still not earning what my original position was advertised at!). in my two years at impact i have helped change the way the new media department works completely. when i started sites were built using font tags and tables! all software was stolen, illegal. designers were developers, developers were shit at their jobs. it was a mess.

two years later and we have a clear separation of design and development, all of our software is legit, our hosting solutions are top notch (and saving us thousands) we have a brilliant project manager (love you babes) and things are really starting to work properly. and of course all of our work is clean and lean semantic XHTML and CSS, everything is usability and accessibility tested and the maintainability is greatly improved.

back to the railsconf promise, a few weeks before going i was made to sign to contracts, one stating that if i leave the company within 18 months of the conference i am to pay-back the full cost of sending me there. and another to increase my notification period to 3 months.

i signed them hesitantly because there was no mention of my pay-rise in either, and i definitely felt there should have been. i raised the issue with my immediate boss and was promised that it’s nothing to worry about and upon my return my contract and pay packet would be reviewed as previously discussed. i decided to trust this as i had pretty good relationship with my my boss and didn’t think he would be able to lie to me about something like that.

biggest. fucking. mistake. of. my. life.

turns out he has no problem lying directly to my face. a week before leaving for portland i’m told that i won’t be getting a pay-rise. now i’m pissed. really fucking pissed.

so back to my review (are you still following?)

i raised all of these points and more in my review, and was basically told (paraphrased):

the past is in the past, deal with it. if you want more money you have to prove yourself.

oh and not forgetting:

if we lose job X and job X i blame you entirely.

half way through the review i checked-out, mentally gave up. fine, i thought, fuck it. i don’t care anymore.

i obviously hadn’t proved myself enough in two years of dedicated work, and was clearly the sole reason for a jobs partially flawed execution (couldn’t have possibly been that the head of client services was less than cooperative in briefing the job in correctly and maintaining a level of communication on the job)

in fact the only thing that has been proved (to me) in two years is that i should have left a long time ago. impact doesn’t ‘get it’ the thinking is all wrong. they’ve come from a print and design background and are trying to make noise in the new media world with the wrong attitude and the wrong management. the best thing they could do would be to remove the input of a certain md from far away (i’ll let you work that one out) and replace the so called department manager (haha) with someone who has actually even done the job and isn’t just a salesman with a scary delusion that a team of 3 people in the nowhere of marden can actually take on a job from playstation.

so back to my news (we’re nearly there i promise)

i’ve been job hunting (obviously) and have some great feedback. i’ve decided to accept a job at Avenue A | Razorfish, the largest interactive agency in the world. i had one interview in the pub which went amazingly well, then another a couple of days later and was offered the job on the spot.

the thing is aa|rf ‘get it’, the management have all been there and done it before, the process is streamlined, the client services team understand how to brief a job in (because they only do digital) and more importantly the culture is amazing, people are given time to develop their skills.

when i told my new employer about the way impact nm runs, they laughed, then were really shocked. they could see i would go nowhere at impact and have decided to let me grow at their place.

i’m gonna miss the people at impact, but not the management.

better things await me. and i hope the remaining nm staff realize that impact will probably never ‘get it’.

It really struck are chord with me, I recommend anyone who writes code to read it then have a think about where you work, could you do better? I think I probably could.

Nine Things Developers Want More Than Money

I’m sure there’s some valid business reason or some sort of financial excuse for this way of working (it does after all make sense, why spend 2 peoples time on 1 job when you can spend 2 peoples time on 2 jobs ) but even so, it just doesn’t feel right. A lot of the time it feels like we’re working in a factory. It’s boring and repetitive, like so:

• Job comes in
• Someone gets briefed
• That person works on that job, alone until it’s finished.
• Rinse
• Repeat

Working in this way generally means that on a job per job basis people’s time is split between 2 or 3 different disciplines, take for example my recent rails project; I have a certain amount of time in which to do it, but that time is taken up (so far) with design work in photoshop. It’s not that I’m useless in photoshop or anything, it’s just not where my focus needs to be on this project. Ideally I would have got my rough ideas down in photoshop and then given those to Ian to do his magic with, freeing me up to work on more important things such as coding.

Another huge problem is lack of man power, we have 2 people full time in our little internet team. 2 people, thats less than piss poor, it’s fucking shit. We easily have enough work to keep 3 or 4 people going, at the very least another person would help take away all the amend based jobs from myself and Ian, oh yeah where I work we have to deal with various amends and updates to existing sites, as well as tackle our own huge projects (which we’re working on solo remember) we don’t have a junior that can just deal with these little annoyances.

It’s all basically very demotivating to me and I just can’t help but wonder what shade of green the grass is on the other side. Maybe I should find out?