I am beginning to think there's no such thing as a workplace that understands work-life balance at even the smallest level. I was hoping that this direct-hire role that I was lucky enough to find and get in spring 2022 might have long-term potential for me, but I'm starting to see its major red flags, so I am not sure how long I'll wind up being here. It has me considering actually responding to the recruiters who have been reaching out with contract-to-hire job opportunities with real interest, when I really would prefer to have a direct-hire role with all the regular benefits.
Our team isn't the largest, but there are 12 of us (counting our manager). We cover a wide swath of technology, so there is a lot of work, but you'd think we'd have enough people to cover for each other when one or more of us is out of office. Well, if there were proper cross-training in the administration of our environment, that could be true. Not here. My counterpart, who has been with the company for a long time, is so overworked that during my first few months there, he's had to repeatedly cancel working sessions/meetings with me that were meant to get me up to speed on everything. I knew this would be a problem when he would eventually be out of office for a week or more at a time. I was proved correct today. I had no access to or knowledge of a system that only he knows about, and of course it had a problem that our team was left scrambling to figure out how to resolve. It turns out that it was just affecting 1 user, so it was totally not an emergency, despite the “high” priority level placed on the ticket when it was created initially. When none of us knew what to do, apparently one of our VPs reached out to my colleague since he's the SME, so that he could jump in and assist, disregarding the fact that he just had surgery and is supposed to be out on leave recovering. Who reaches out to someone who is on medical leave about a minor issue like that?!?
The other side of it is that my colleague jumped in and started working on it. He reinforced that this behavior from the VP (and from others) is OK. It turns out that it's not even something our team can really resolve on our own – it involves one of the other teams, but he got them working on it. While it's great that at least the issue will be fixed, overworking someone so much that he is not able to properly train his new colleague to take on this work, particularly in his absence, and then being asked to look into what was not an emergency issue while out on medical leave and feeling obligated to do so because that person is a VP, well, that's not OK. The irony is that my colleague is one of the primary people who was speaking up in an open discussion a larger chunk of our organization was having last week about how to improve upon work-life balance. He was voicing his frustrations then, but then doesn't have an off switch when he certainly should. You can't really have it both ways. I just don't get why it's so hard to set boundaries and stick to them.