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This is not the journal post I planned (hoped?) to be writing this weekend, but Stuff Happened and here I am.
Beyond that large parts of this are not exactly what I had mentally outlined when I sat down (hours ago :o ) but getting these thoughts out where I can see them was the point of the exercise.
~~~
So I have been with my current place of employment for pretty close to 15 years (I didn't record here when I actually started but going back to the first reference I can find, sometime late 2007). The pay rate was OK when I started but it then has not budged until earlier this year, when I got a small bump. This was fine when I was only directly supporting myself on that income, but for supporting two other people it is simply not cutting it.
(If I am blunt with myself we've only been making ends meet this year through a series of windfalls - the government's cost of living payments, money from D.s mum's estate, actually selling off a few things rather than donating them and so on. On the other side of the equation that's against a series of unexpected expenses, but it is not a very comfortable place to be.)
On Friday one of our admin staff (who has been with the company at least as long as I have and who I consider a good friend) tagged me on my way out and asked if I was (still) good to be a work reference for her. In the ensuing conversation I learnt that our front-line support person is already leaving (to get paid more picking vegetables) and that all our admin/frontline staff, whom I already knew are (like me) paid far less than they are worth, are currently getting paid less than a new hire at a supermarket[1].
(I also learned that the admin/helpdesk staff /hadn't/ been told that our new-hire programmer is coming in for a meet-the-team one afternoon this coming week before officially starting the following week. This is kind of typical of the level of communication in our company, one of many flaws which I will enumerate over the course of this post. Related, the existing developers have not been involved in the current recruitment round or the one before that, only finding out who / that someone has been hired after the fact.)
On top of that the other senior developer announced he was leaving before Xmas last year, and is only still with us (at reduced hours) because we don't have anyone else who does apps and (I suspect) he like me does not want to leave /the apps/ unsupported.
Which brings me around to(wards) reasons why I am still there, why I have put 15 years of emotional investment into / often running my mental health into the ground for a company with next-to-no internal systems, terrible internal communications, and frankly unethical pay-rates and practices who don't, once you get past the convivial surface, actually appear to have the faintest idea how to value their staff.
[1] this more than my own situation makes me righteously angry ðŸ˜
~~~
Big aside, I don't think this is precisely deliberate on the co-owners' == managers' parts. It's a small kiwi business effectively originally set up to provide the owners with a self-employed living. The target niche has mostly been small businesses / not-for-profit organisations without a lot of money (the $10,000+ they joke about our competitors charging[2]) to spend on a website. I think it may (before I was brought in with the purchase of my "previous" employer) been built off the back of the founder having one big client.
And I don't for one minute believe the owners are "creaming it" either. But they are /very/ focused on keeping costs down, consistently refusing to invest in tools/systems that would make our lives as developers - actually extend that to "staff who have different responsibilities wrt client/projects throughout the lifecycle" easier and increase productivity, or in any professional development for us beyond what we get figuring out how to make things work. (I am very lucky that previously mentioned developer still has the energy and interest to keep up to date with the latest developments; update the other developers on said developments and build them into our ever-evolving in-house framework - did I mention he is leaving?)
At the same time they are /definitely/ taking advantage of all of us, and while I don't care about people "taking advantage of" me when I have plenty to give and need little, which has been the case for most of the past 15 years,
* I /do/ care about it happening to other people (especially when there is bullying behaviour involved, which there is)
* I no longer have plenty to give / now need enough for three[3] so I need to start caring for me
[2] that would probably be because said competitors /pay their staff properly/, or at least better.
~~~
Where was I. Oh yes, reasons I (have) stayed. Well there is the almost complete flexibility I have about where, when and how I do my work, as long as as much as I can do get done (minimum 20 hours a week on the clock. I have consistently been making 26+ hours recently spurred on by the need to meet household costs, but that has included quite a bit of going on on weekends (so 6-day weeks).
And I do like the work, most of the time. I can burn out on big projects where, especially if my brain chemistry is not playing ball, everything seems to be taking longer than it should and new requirements /sub-requirements keep coming up[3]. But most of the time, as long as I'm not having a day where my focus is /shot/, I can bring up my code-writing program[4] and at least nudge myself into a good zone, and walk away at the end of the day feeling like I wrote some good code even if I almost never get as much done as I planned to[5]. It does tick the 'accomplished something' box in my brain even as I know that the majority of my time is not being spent on anything with lasting impact on anybody :(
There's the people, some of them anyway :) Development/support/admin are all very competent and people I am glad to know, it's just the owners-cum-managers who aren't very good at running a business, and with whom I'd have very little in common if not for our shared employment :/
That leads directly to the first-equal reason I've stayed, loyalty. People who have known me for a while know that I am loyal to a fault. In this case I am loyal, not necessarily to the business itself but to
* (most of) the people there,
* to the code that I have written, have the institutional knowledge of (because we also suck at documentation), and thus consider it is my responsibility to support, and
* to some of the clients or users for whom I have, ultimately, produced that code.
(There is a lot more to unpack there and I was expecting to do it here but this post is already long enough and has gone in other directions (at least half of what is below is already written).)
The other first-equal reason, against which the others may well just be justifications, is comfort/fear. In the same way as I
* stayed at my first job for, oh, four years longer than I should have[6]
* didn't move on selling Gladson when I should have
* have a looong history of not leaving my rut until it ends at a cliff / someone pries me out with a crowbar
... because I can't visualise myself working anywhere else it is a massive unknown and as such a /huge/ risk. In this instance have /zero/ confidence in my ability to get another job given my disabilities, no workable plan b, and no spare emotional/mental fortitude to even investigate options.
[3a] Requirements discovery and proper outlining pre-quote are two more things "our" company is very bad at. I am personally terrible at actually assessing how long anything beyond even a simple project will take, even with the doubling doubling rule. And of course we're under pressure to keep quotes on the low side because of our market...
[3b] I've had a series of big projects this year (and last) which were in the queue for weeks if not months because we've been down multiple developers, and once started just repeats of "the client wants an ETA" and "I've promised the client it will be done by X date" on a project which will be done /when it is done/ because I can only develop (and well) so fast.
[4] I have finally, this year, found an IDE which works for me (Visual Studio Code) and my productivity has ticked up significantly, but I still resort to Notepad++ for sites which I don't have a full local copy of.
[5] Many years ago a friend wrote, not long after he had started working as a developer and I'm pretty sure before I had started, words to the effect that now he had a better idea of the amount of time it actually took to write software the amount it cost to buy (mostly on CDs at the time) suddenly seemed much more reasonable, and that has stuck with me.
[6] The loyalty thing was a big factor there as well :/
~~~
Anyway I walked out on Friday pretty sure the company is going to implode in some form or other in 2023 [7]. I spent a couple of hours of Friday evening grabbing up-to-date salary guidelines for NZ from the web (happy to add more to my dataset, if you know of a good one), and determining a) that I wasn't sure exactly how I fitted into the definitions for several of them and b) nevertheless at market rates I should be being taking home at least $10k if not $20k more as a "Senior Developer" even on my part-time hours.
I put out an (audience restricted) query on some of my social media for more information on how I should classify myself.
Broadly, I work with the PHP/MySQL/HTML/CSS/Javascript set of web-related languages,. My typical job is to take the pretty pictures in PSD form from our designers (usually a set of pages at large-desktop size and the homepage only at mobile device size) and turn them into functioning websites which will work at any screen size. This includes an administration panel where the client can manage their own content, often including bespoke content types (eg for a list of projects completed or a product gallery which doesn't go as far as eCommerce integration). Additional functionality often includes e-commerce and client/customer log-in areas or 3rd-part API integration (eg Mailchimp, Trademe, Dropbox, assorted payment gateways,...). Big sites I have worked on have included business directories, rental/for sale properties management, public listings (for contact not on-site sale) for expensive niches which Trademe doesn't service well ... and that's off the top of my head.
Other work includes figuring out why something is broken in a site we have taken over hosting (i.e. not our in-house code), or how to include a new feature in such a site (or an older version of our code) without a full rebuild into said codebase.
My work touches on user interfaces/experience and accessibility (the latter being something else that my fully-able managers do not see the point in, but as developers we do what we can).
The consensus is that I would be classified as a "Full Stack Developer".
Despite the 15 years career experience (and more before that as I first got into web development as a secondary responsibility at my previous long-term job, then actually getting my Diploma in [pause as I struggle to remember] E-Business support) I don't feel comfortable considering a "Senior" tier because of
* lack of actual server-side experience. I'm usually just FTPing things around. Sometimes I have to SSH in and grep some log files.
* lack of experience with any out-of-house PHP frameworks
* lack of experience with any javascript frameworks more recent than jQuery (and most of what I used to use jQuery for I now do in regular javascript)
* lack of experience working/programming in a team
* lack of confidence in my ability to hit deadlines etc even with a supportive employer + appropriate hours, given my fluctuating mental health and physical energy
And I do not have the time/energy to attempt to remedy any of the preceding items on my own behalf, or I would be.
So /if/ I was working a 40-hour week my current gross would be ~$66k. Looking through salary guides at lower bands, or the mid-range if bands are not used it seems even given the above I should be looking at a gross of anywhere from $80k to $100k if I was being paid what the market thinks my skillset is worth.
It seems fair to consider that at my current workplace my institutional knowledge of our existing and legacy codebases easily counteracts the lacks of experience listed above. So I should arguably be worth ($100k @ 40hours scaled down to current hours) = ~$65k to them, which is also about where the guide I was able to narrow down to "PHP Developer in Christchurch with 15 years experience" puts me. That's over half again what I currently get.
[7] While I was taking a break from writing this post I came across this Twitter thread about "the Trust Thermocline" which I think describes exactly what has just happened among our staff.
~~~
I have another concern as well, directly related to my mental health. Some of the things I have been thinking about or almost planning to say to management, or the way it feels when thinking about all this are very like things I have said or written in the past when poor mental health led to bad judgement and ... well intentioned but in retrospect mentally and factually deficient call-outs which led to bridges if not actually being burned in all cases at least set alight. I am questioning my judgement on every decision, and very aware that this time it's not just me that cops the flak if I mess up big time, but also D & E who are dependent on me. On the one hand I can not continue to meet my commitments to them if things continue on the way they are; on the other hand it feels that any substantive effort to improve things is likely to blow up in my face and leave us completely adrift.
I do have to do something, hence the process I am going through now of assessing an arguable value for myself which may possibly lead to seriously looking at/for other opportunities.
Being in many ways a "fixer" at heart (I know, not always a positive trait) my preference would be to "fix" where I am now. There have been gradual improvements they we've pushed for over the time I've been there, but they have all been slow coming and if I and the others continue not to be valued enough to be paid what we need let alone what we are worth ... I don't know that it is worth it any more.
Beyond that large parts of this are not exactly what I had mentally outlined when I sat down (hours ago :o ) but getting these thoughts out where I can see them was the point of the exercise.
~~~
So I have been with my current place of employment for pretty close to 15 years (I didn't record here when I actually started but going back to the first reference I can find, sometime late 2007). The pay rate was OK when I started but it then has not budged until earlier this year, when I got a small bump. This was fine when I was only directly supporting myself on that income, but for supporting two other people it is simply not cutting it.
(If I am blunt with myself we've only been making ends meet this year through a series of windfalls - the government's cost of living payments, money from D.s mum's estate, actually selling off a few things rather than donating them and so on. On the other side of the equation that's against a series of unexpected expenses, but it is not a very comfortable place to be.)
On Friday one of our admin staff (who has been with the company at least as long as I have and who I consider a good friend) tagged me on my way out and asked if I was (still) good to be a work reference for her. In the ensuing conversation I learnt that our front-line support person is already leaving (to get paid more picking vegetables) and that all our admin/frontline staff, whom I already knew are (like me) paid far less than they are worth, are currently getting paid less than a new hire at a supermarket[1].
(I also learned that the admin/helpdesk staff /hadn't/ been told that our new-hire programmer is coming in for a meet-the-team one afternoon this coming week before officially starting the following week. This is kind of typical of the level of communication in our company, one of many flaws which I will enumerate over the course of this post. Related, the existing developers have not been involved in the current recruitment round or the one before that, only finding out who / that someone has been hired after the fact.)
On top of that the other senior developer announced he was leaving before Xmas last year, and is only still with us (at reduced hours) because we don't have anyone else who does apps and (I suspect) he like me does not want to leave /the apps/ unsupported.
Which brings me around to(wards) reasons why I am still there, why I have put 15 years of emotional investment into / often running my mental health into the ground for a company with next-to-no internal systems, terrible internal communications, and frankly unethical pay-rates and practices who don't, once you get past the convivial surface, actually appear to have the faintest idea how to value their staff.
[1] this more than my own situation makes me righteously angry ðŸ˜
~~~
Big aside, I don't think this is precisely deliberate on the co-owners' == managers' parts. It's a small kiwi business effectively originally set up to provide the owners with a self-employed living. The target niche has mostly been small businesses / not-for-profit organisations without a lot of money (the $10,000+ they joke about our competitors charging[2]) to spend on a website. I think it may (before I was brought in with the purchase of my "previous" employer) been built off the back of the founder having one big client.
And I don't for one minute believe the owners are "creaming it" either. But they are /very/ focused on keeping costs down, consistently refusing to invest in tools/systems that would make our lives as developers - actually extend that to "staff who have different responsibilities wrt client/projects throughout the lifecycle" easier and increase productivity, or in any professional development for us beyond what we get figuring out how to make things work. (I am very lucky that previously mentioned developer still has the energy and interest to keep up to date with the latest developments; update the other developers on said developments and build them into our ever-evolving in-house framework - did I mention he is leaving?)
At the same time they are /definitely/ taking advantage of all of us, and while I don't care about people "taking advantage of" me when I have plenty to give and need little, which has been the case for most of the past 15 years,
* I /do/ care about it happening to other people (especially when there is bullying behaviour involved, which there is)
* I no longer have plenty to give / now need enough for three[3] so I need to start caring for me
[2] that would probably be because said competitors /pay their staff properly/, or at least better.
~~~
Where was I. Oh yes, reasons I (have) stayed. Well there is the almost complete flexibility I have about where, when and how I do my work, as long as as much as I can do get done (minimum 20 hours a week on the clock. I have consistently been making 26+ hours recently spurred on by the need to meet household costs, but that has included quite a bit of going on on weekends (so 6-day weeks).
And I do like the work, most of the time. I can burn out on big projects where, especially if my brain chemistry is not playing ball, everything seems to be taking longer than it should and new requirements /sub-requirements keep coming up[3]. But most of the time, as long as I'm not having a day where my focus is /shot/, I can bring up my code-writing program[4] and at least nudge myself into a good zone, and walk away at the end of the day feeling like I wrote some good code even if I almost never get as much done as I planned to[5]. It does tick the 'accomplished something' box in my brain even as I know that the majority of my time is not being spent on anything with lasting impact on anybody :(
There's the people, some of them anyway :) Development/support/admin are all very competent and people I am glad to know, it's just the owners-cum-managers who aren't very good at running a business, and with whom I'd have very little in common if not for our shared employment :/
That leads directly to the first-equal reason I've stayed, loyalty. People who have known me for a while know that I am loyal to a fault. In this case I am loyal, not necessarily to the business itself but to
* (most of) the people there,
* to the code that I have written, have the institutional knowledge of (because we also suck at documentation), and thus consider it is my responsibility to support, and
* to some of the clients or users for whom I have, ultimately, produced that code.
(There is a lot more to unpack there and I was expecting to do it here but this post is already long enough and has gone in other directions (at least half of what is below is already written).)
The other first-equal reason, against which the others may well just be justifications, is comfort/fear. In the same way as I
* stayed at my first job for, oh, four years longer than I should have[6]
* didn't move on selling Gladson when I should have
* have a looong history of not leaving my rut until it ends at a cliff / someone pries me out with a crowbar
... because I can't visualise myself working anywhere else it is a massive unknown and as such a /huge/ risk. In this instance have /zero/ confidence in my ability to get another job given my disabilities, no workable plan b, and no spare emotional/mental fortitude to even investigate options.
[3a] Requirements discovery and proper outlining pre-quote are two more things "our" company is very bad at. I am personally terrible at actually assessing how long anything beyond even a simple project will take, even with the doubling doubling rule. And of course we're under pressure to keep quotes on the low side because of our market...
[3b] I've had a series of big projects this year (and last) which were in the queue for weeks if not months because we've been down multiple developers, and once started just repeats of "the client wants an ETA" and "I've promised the client it will be done by X date" on a project which will be done /when it is done/ because I can only develop (and well) so fast.
[4] I have finally, this year, found an IDE which works for me (Visual Studio Code) and my productivity has ticked up significantly, but I still resort to Notepad++ for sites which I don't have a full local copy of.
[5] Many years ago a friend wrote, not long after he had started working as a developer and I'm pretty sure before I had started, words to the effect that now he had a better idea of the amount of time it actually took to write software the amount it cost to buy (mostly on CDs at the time) suddenly seemed much more reasonable, and that has stuck with me.
[6] The loyalty thing was a big factor there as well :/
~~~
Anyway I walked out on Friday pretty sure the company is going to implode in some form or other in 2023 [7]. I spent a couple of hours of Friday evening grabbing up-to-date salary guidelines for NZ from the web (happy to add more to my dataset, if you know of a good one), and determining a) that I wasn't sure exactly how I fitted into the definitions for several of them and b) nevertheless at market rates I should be being taking home at least $10k if not $20k more as a "Senior Developer" even on my part-time hours.
I put out an (audience restricted) query on some of my social media for more information on how I should classify myself.
Broadly, I work with the PHP/MySQL/HTML/CSS/Javascript set of web-related languages,. My typical job is to take the pretty pictures in PSD form from our designers (usually a set of pages at large-desktop size and the homepage only at mobile device size) and turn them into functioning websites which will work at any screen size. This includes an administration panel where the client can manage their own content, often including bespoke content types (eg for a list of projects completed or a product gallery which doesn't go as far as eCommerce integration). Additional functionality often includes e-commerce and client/customer log-in areas or 3rd-part API integration (eg Mailchimp, Trademe, Dropbox, assorted payment gateways,...). Big sites I have worked on have included business directories, rental/for sale properties management, public listings (for contact not on-site sale) for expensive niches which Trademe doesn't service well ... and that's off the top of my head.
Other work includes figuring out why something is broken in a site we have taken over hosting (i.e. not our in-house code), or how to include a new feature in such a site (or an older version of our code) without a full rebuild into said codebase.
My work touches on user interfaces/experience and accessibility (the latter being something else that my fully-able managers do not see the point in, but as developers we do what we can).
The consensus is that I would be classified as a "Full Stack Developer".
Despite the 15 years career experience (and more before that as I first got into web development as a secondary responsibility at my previous long-term job, then actually getting my Diploma in [pause as I struggle to remember] E-Business support) I don't feel comfortable considering a "Senior" tier because of
* lack of actual server-side experience. I'm usually just FTPing things around. Sometimes I have to SSH in and grep some log files.
* lack of experience with any out-of-house PHP frameworks
* lack of experience with any javascript frameworks more recent than jQuery (and most of what I used to use jQuery for I now do in regular javascript)
* lack of experience working/programming in a team
* lack of confidence in my ability to hit deadlines etc even with a supportive employer + appropriate hours, given my fluctuating mental health and physical energy
And I do not have the time/energy to attempt to remedy any of the preceding items on my own behalf, or I would be.
So /if/ I was working a 40-hour week my current gross would be ~$66k. Looking through salary guides at lower bands, or the mid-range if bands are not used it seems even given the above I should be looking at a gross of anywhere from $80k to $100k if I was being paid what the market thinks my skillset is worth.
It seems fair to consider that at my current workplace my institutional knowledge of our existing and legacy codebases easily counteracts the lacks of experience listed above. So I should arguably be worth ($100k @ 40hours scaled down to current hours) = ~$65k to them, which is also about where the guide I was able to narrow down to "PHP Developer in Christchurch with 15 years experience" puts me. That's over half again what I currently get.
[7] While I was taking a break from writing this post I came across this Twitter thread about "the Trust Thermocline" which I think describes exactly what has just happened among our staff.
~~~
I have another concern as well, directly related to my mental health. Some of the things I have been thinking about or almost planning to say to management, or the way it feels when thinking about all this are very like things I have said or written in the past when poor mental health led to bad judgement and ... well intentioned but in retrospect mentally and factually deficient call-outs which led to bridges if not actually being burned in all cases at least set alight. I am questioning my judgement on every decision, and very aware that this time it's not just me that cops the flak if I mess up big time, but also D & E who are dependent on me. On the one hand I can not continue to meet my commitments to them if things continue on the way they are; on the other hand it feels that any substantive effort to improve things is likely to blow up in my face and leave us completely adrift.
I do have to do something, hence the process I am going through now of assessing an arguable value for myself which may possibly lead to seriously looking at/for other opportunities.
Being in many ways a "fixer" at heart (I know, not always a positive trait) my preference would be to "fix" where I am now. There have been gradual improvements they we've pushed for over the time I've been there, but they have all been slow coming and if I and the others continue not to be valued enough to be paid what we need let alone what we are worth ... I don't know that it is worth it any more.
Tags:
- brain dump,
- cluebat,
- depression,
- despair,
- doom,
- essay,
- health,
- introspective,
- life,
- link,
- money,
- motivation,
- puzzle pieces,
- sanity,
- vent,
- work
