[ Previous entry: "Goth control I can handle... but not this type of crowd control..." ] [Main Index] [ Next entry: "High School is soooo Tubular... like, oh my gawd!" ]

09/02/2004 Entry: "Jumping the ship" Okay, this has gone on long enough. I thought I could wait a while, and make this big announcement, but this is taking so long, and people are asking me about it, that I think I am going to give to spill the beans. On Monday, I was offered a promotion to another department as a Unix Systems Administrator. I will be leaving my "wardialing job" to do a "systems maintenance" kind of job where I build software tools that maintain, track, and report on servers, system patches, and server performance. It's actually kind of the same thing, except I'll really be leaving the Windows world behind. These servers primarily do bridging between massive search operations (like with Google) and our company's applications and services. I'll be working directly with Sun, HP, and Red Hat systems. My Linux and Perl skills have been of special interest to this group, who need a programmer to make their jobs a little easier (parsing logs, making automated patching tools, that sort of thing). Those privy to my "friends only" LiveJournal know that this has been an ongoing thing, and it's still not 100% certain, but it is 99% certain now because they offered it to me, and the only snag is HR and pay scale. I have this fear the pay will not be that much more, which it SHOULD be, but apparently, internal transfers get paid much less than people off the street. That's why I am not overly happy-wappy, because I am taking on more responsibility, for possibly not that much of a raise in pay. I'll also be one week a month, with a limited on-call the rest of the month (like as secondary, or specialist when I actually take over sets of servers that become "mine" so to speak). So why take it? I have my reasons. I have been doing this job a long time, 5 years, which in the IT world is like decades. I started testing nodes for international people in 1999, then started domestic in 2000. I am excited to learn new things. I am also tired of politics that have gone sour in some of the upper levels since a management shift over a year ago (I don't want to talk about it in a public blog). I should be really happy, but there is some issues that dull the edge. The pay being one (unless it's more than I expected, then... happy happy joy joy), but also a lot of my team apparently relied on me to keep it together, and now that I am leaving, it's depressed them. One actually already applied for another job once he heard I got one. My boss is not looking well these days.