Pants Full of Unix

So, I got an email from one of my favorite developers (it's a four-way tie, and if you're one of them and actually reading this, you're probably included) at $FORMER_EMPLOYER stating, in the subject alone, that the New Sysadmin had just resigned.

Let me recap here, for those who don't know the whole story. These people hired me not straight out of but a semester before I was done with school. It was way more than one person could handle, and they were paying me way less than they should have been, but I was young, and had a touch of first-job syndrome, and can't complain in the least about the experience it got me.

So, but we managed to hire somebody. He and I butted heads (which would have been fine alone, really; it was healthy… and we're friends, now), he didn't really want to be working there (it's not exactly the moral high-ground, that place), and he really wanted to do things a different way than the CTO. So he got canned.

He was replaced by a less-experienced (than the first hire and than me) guy, much closer to my age, who was also a bit overwhelmed, also got burned because I couldn't get myself out of dealing with broken shit long enough to explain to him how to deal with that broken shit, but to whom I never had to repeat myself, which is an invaluable, and often unnoticed, life skill. He got good fast.

Then they canned me, because I'm an asshole, and number 2 was stranded. Shortly after they called me back, as mentioned towards the bottom of that post. A while later, they hired some guy, older than any of the above, who looked great on paper, but had no work motivation, and whose MO was “shift blame” rather than “fix the fucking problem”.

Shortly after that, fed up with the situation (including having been overheard to say, “Fuck! This job is turning me into !”), number 2 resigned, and went to a less stressful, higher-paying job where he's probably not learning as much, but looks (and, hell, is; hi, T) like a superstar because of the degree to which he (like I) had to know and deal with Everything. It was sink or swim, and he's one up on me because he had the common sense to pull himself up on the deck rather than keep treading water till his muscles popped.

Some time a while after number 2 resigned, and I'm not sure if I've mentioned this here or not, I got a Great call from a recruiter. Offering me twice what my salary had been. I'd already accepted FTE at $CURRENT_EMPLOYER, but he wanted to give me the pitch anyway, because this job so exactly matched my background. It was for a Philadelphia-area direct marketer. “No, wait, stop. Trust me, I'm not the right person for this position, and it would be pretty far against your interest to send me there.” It's not like I didn't list the company's name on my resume… So far as I can tell, they haven't filled that position yet.

And so then they were left with number 3, Mr. Pass-the-Buck. He's the New Sysadmin who just resigned. They've got nothing. I've made it known, to the right people, that if something explodes, they still get my friends consulting rate (roughly three times what my effective hourly rate was while I was FTE there, making the naive assumption that I only worked about 60 hours a week, which is mighty gracious of me by all reports), and they're welcome to contact me. Not because I like the company, but because people I care about will still get fucked if things are broken.

The punchline: the person who gave me this information continued to respond to the email thread not once but twice, after stating that her contractions had started and she should probably get to the hospital soon. Woman! Turn off the laptop, you're having a goddamn baby! But seriously, well wishes, SJ! Hope to meet the li'l geek soon!