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                           Interview with a Manager

Obligatory Sidebar Links

* Official lubricant of the new economy [1]
* Unamerican: the Cause that refreshes [2]
* Creating Livable Alternatives to Wage Slavery [3]
* The Cult of the Job [4]
* VC Demands Fuel Revolt At Startup [5]
* I can't get laid off [6]
* How the ax falls [7]
* Life on the verge of a dot-com breakdown [8]
* Does Your Employer Own Your Thoughts? [9]
* Horror Stories of Working the Web [10]


I had my interview [11] today with a new company for a similar position I now
hold. I'm more than qualified and it's clear they want to hire me on the
spot.

The company itself is closer than where I work now, and with four data
centers across the country, and just tons of insane hardware to drool over
(Sun 450 Enterprise systems everywhere! Raid systems! Fail over machines! Two
Cisco 7500s! Terrabytes of disk space!) it does sound tempting. But even with
all that, and their corporate headquarters in a newly constructed four story
building (where I would be working) and over 400 employees, it is still a
dotcom company and with the recent Internet stock bubble popping, and ad
revenue sinking it does give me pause working there.

But that's not the real reason I'm hesitant to work there.

The real reason I'm hesitant to work there is well, it's work. It would be
more work than I really want at this point, involving more system
administration than I really care to do. And like most companies in the U.
S., you get your standard two weeks of vacation (but only after you're there
for six months). After three years, you then get three weeks, but from the
sound of it, not many people there have qualified for that, nor from the
tone, is it expected you actually take all three weeks.

But that could be my biases showing here.

The one manager I talked to (out of three that interviewed me) about vacation
time, I mentioned that I was used to taking three, four weeks vacation time a
year at previous jobs, usually with a month's notice and not paid (the notion
of an actual paid vacation is rather novel to me to be sure).

“I don't care if I'm paid or not,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “But I just can't let anyone take time off like that. This is
a twenty-four-seven company and we need people to cover this place around the
clock.”

“I understand that.”

“And if I let you do it, then other people will want to do it.” Anarchy
reigns, hell freezes over, cats and dogs start living together!

“But I've heard that people in Europe get six weeks vacation a year,” I said.

“But it's the law there.” It's a fair conclustion that there is no way I'm
getting more than two weeks vacation time out of this job. “You're just
living in the wrong country.”

The other sticking point was the simple question he asked me: “Where do you
see your career going?”

Well, I thought, I still don't know what I want to do when I grow up. “I
really don't know,” is what I actually said. And it's true. I don't know. I
took my current job because I was pretty much burned out of the whole dotcom
insanity, development, insane schedules, long hours and other corporate
supidity (not that I worked insane schedules, but I tend to avoid such
situations).

And it is a dotcom.

But I have a few days to think this over.

[1] http://www.fuckedcompany.com/
[2] http://www.unamerican.com/
[3] http://www.whywork.org/
[4] http://www.misterridiculous.com/columns/djswanson/djswanson.1.html
[5] http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/03/06/BU205389.DTL
[6] http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/02/26/can_t_get_laid_off/index.html
[7] http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/01/25/how_the_ax_falls/index.html
[8] http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/01/25/lay_off_sidebar/
[9] http://www.unixguru.com/
[10] http://www.netslaves.com/
[11] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2001/03/06.1

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