Sunday, March 29, 2009
I Second That (Lack Of A) Promotion
I'm having my yearly performance evaluation at work tomorrow, and my boss emailed my evaluation to me so I can look it over before we talk (nice thought, but it kills the suspense).
My evaluation is middle-of-the-road, i.e. "satisfactory." When I was first reading the evaluation I was nodding my head in agreement, because frankly I am far too ambivalent about my job, and IT as a whole, to commit to it and go that extra mile. Plus, I'm still recovering from the bad case of burnout I got after going through a very difficult time in my job, when the manager of my group was so incompetent that people in other groups continually expressed amazement that she was a manager, and when the roles and responsibilities in the larger IT group as a whole were poorly defined so everything was about chaos and stress.
Basically, my goal is to not get fired until I figure out what I want to do with my life. Do I want to commit to this career, or go back to grad school? At this point, I have no clue, and my evaluation reflects that.
Then I started thinking about how bad I'd feel if someone in my group got promoted ahead of me. One of the people I work with is definitely the better technician by far, but she has big anxiety problems when dealing with large groups of people and as such always sits on the sidelines when there's a big problem that requires inter-departmental coordination; those problems usually fall to me.
Plus, if someone in my group was promoted to a higher level (the three of us are on the same level), that person would have the responsibility of providing 'guidance' to the others in certain situations, and none of us are capable of doing that, meaning that we'd probably end up back in a situation that harkened back to the days of the incompetent manager. It wouldn't be as bad as that, but I feel like we've all become massively neurotic about such situations due to past experiences and the peaceable existence we've managed to scratch out for ourselves would be threatened.
My evaluation is middle-of-the-road, i.e. "satisfactory." When I was first reading the evaluation I was nodding my head in agreement, because frankly I am far too ambivalent about my job, and IT as a whole, to commit to it and go that extra mile. Plus, I'm still recovering from the bad case of burnout I got after going through a very difficult time in my job, when the manager of my group was so incompetent that people in other groups continually expressed amazement that she was a manager, and when the roles and responsibilities in the larger IT group as a whole were poorly defined so everything was about chaos and stress.
Basically, my goal is to not get fired until I figure out what I want to do with my life. Do I want to commit to this career, or go back to grad school? At this point, I have no clue, and my evaluation reflects that.
Then I started thinking about how bad I'd feel if someone in my group got promoted ahead of me. One of the people I work with is definitely the better technician by far, but she has big anxiety problems when dealing with large groups of people and as such always sits on the sidelines when there's a big problem that requires inter-departmental coordination; those problems usually fall to me.
Plus, if someone in my group was promoted to a higher level (the three of us are on the same level), that person would have the responsibility of providing 'guidance' to the others in certain situations, and none of us are capable of doing that, meaning that we'd probably end up back in a situation that harkened back to the days of the incompetent manager. It wouldn't be as bad as that, but I feel like we've all become massively neurotic about such situations due to past experiences and the peaceable existence we've managed to scratch out for ourselves would be threatened.
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