OK, I haven't posted in quite a while. I have either felt that I had nothing of importance to say or I felt like doing something else. On most days it's been both. It's an off Friday for me, so today I have the time to post. Whether or not it's important is up to the reader.
I have now been six weeks into the new job. My new co-workers are really great people. As for the work itself, I can't say that it's the most interesting I've gotten to do. The project itself is fascinating, but as a representative of the customer there isn't very much in the way of engineering that I get to do. I will likely have a visit out to the field at the end of July, getting to see and do some things few engineers get to do.
I'm also making some damn good money in this job. Whether or not I get to keep it remains to be seen. I've had to put $1500 into my truck this week, and we're having to put $2000 or so into Sheila's car. In the long run it's much more cost-effective to keep and maintain the vehicles that you have, since Brandon's done to the supply chain what a former President that I didn't like warned us about.
But getting back to my inactivity on this blog, I have felt on many occasions to vent about what led me to leave my position behind to get to where I'm at now. I can report that they've lost some more key people, people that I didn't think would ever leave, so I'm not the only one that had some issues. I have thought about reasons why an engineer would leave a neat job such as working on hardware for manned spaceflight to go off and do something else. Here is what I have come up with.
1. Compensation. Salary adjustments for the past five years have not kept up with the cost of living. With the inflation that Brandon and his policies have given us, the choice is between a 15% increase for switching jobs or an annual 2% merit raise.
2. People don't like the way they're being treated. There are two major companies in Arizona that you could accuse of going out of their way to make their employees leave. That worked when there was a downturn ten years ago but it ain't working now. The economy got hot in 2018, and those two companies have struggled to get people. When they get them, they can't keep them, because of how they're still being treated.
3. Bad management, though I can make the argument this is what causes #2 above. My former employer would on occasion spring what I called the "Friday Surprise". Big deadline on Monday, we need you to work both days of the weekend, and by the way I'll be available to support you once I'm done skydiving and once my kid's soccer game is over. I kid you not, I have heard both of those from a senior manager. And bad managers never go away, especially in a large company..........they are always given another major program to run into the ground.
4. Company culture. We have one of the minor aerospace companies in the state that was dysfunctional from the top all the way to the basement. I knew someone who worked there. All sorts of affairs going on between managers and subordinates, favoritism, backstabbing, and it is still going on there, even though there has now been a homicide due to upper management toleration of that culture. Oh, and one of my former employers tolerated an affair between a supervisor and a subordinate, both of them married but not to each other, and a homicide damn near resulted from that one. In this case, the supervisor wasn't murdered, but he was allowed to keep his job. The angry husband, who worked there, was let go. And that employer is now one fifth the size of what they used to be.
5. Benefits. This can be a reason why people change jobs but in my opinion any of the four mentioned above will be more of an aggravating factor.
6. Job satisfaction. If you don't like what you're doing, you either change jobs or you retire. I liked what I was doing. I liked it very much. It was really neat stuff, but one or more of the issues above came into play.
7. The "ethics" of your job. If you're working on something you don't really believe in, it can get difficult. It can be compounded if there's bad management involved who are cutting corners and cheating the customer. Folks, in nearly forty years of being an engineer, I've seen that more than once. I can't help but wonder if in one of those instances where I was eased off was so that I wouldn't be subpoenaed by a grand jury looking into business irregularities. I can't really be sure. Did someone think I saw or knew something I shouldn't have seen or known?
So, there you have seven reasons what people change jobs. I have admitted that compensation was one reason why I left and moved on to something else. I suppose you can bet money that some of the other factors mentioned above also came into play, and maybe you would win that bet, but I ain't talking.
Few would understand.
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