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November 12, 2003

working in the technical world

By a strange accident of fate, I am a technical consultant. I implement Enterprise System Management tools for my company's clients. I train them how to use them and I also support them. It seems that every year, I have to get recertified, so I am always learning upgrades, new architectures, etc. This is a far cry from my psychology degree, let me tell you! I got a liberal arts degree because I hated math, and now math is an integral part of my worklife.

I enjoy what I do, but it is getting harder and harder to support 4 or 5 versions of the same software - especially when there are huge changes between one version and another. And to make it harder, we have our own software that we use with the 3rd party software, and we have just as many versions of that.

Sigh. Anytime a client calls and has problems, if their install is more than 2 years old, I tell them they will not be happy until they upgrade. I give them all the reasons why - the main reason being that it just plain works a lot better now than it did 2 or 3 or 4 years ago.

But they never want to pay for services. They want me for free. And a lot of times, they get me for free because the higher ups want the clients to be happy.

Now, I would not mind this at all, I get paid either which way, but part of my annual review is based on my billable hours. So if upper management gives me away for weeks at a time for new projects or to make a client happy who is not happy (I kinda specialize in those cases, most of the time), I don't get any billable hours out of it.

Which brings me to my next worry - maybe I won't get a decent raise!

Ok. No more work talk.

Posted by Beth at November 12, 2003 6:08 PM

Comments

Posted by: hln at November 14, 2003 1:17 PM