I wrote this to reflect upon my experience in the IT field today after getting rejected for the 3rd time in a row after nailing all the interviews.
The IT Market – 2023
How I started
I’ve been fixing PC’s since I was 14 years old, swapping out the memory chips one by one until we located the bad one and the motherboard finally posted. This was in the early 1990’s. Fast forward thirty years and I’ve graduated college, got an MBA and have made a nice career for myself in the IT industry. What I’ve experienced in the last couple years however, isn’t like anything I’ve seen before in the field.
Awesome Opportunities
I started as customer technical support, answering calls from customers needing basic website or payment assistance and slowly worked my way up the ladder. Next, I found a systems administrator role with a national travel company geared towards college aged folks. The work allowed me to learn tons, touch my first servers and switch stacks and even hubs. I even flooded my first network with a multicast imaging attempt but at the end of the day the pay abysmal so eventually I looked elsewhere.
Looking around on Craigslist I found an organization that built and sold distributed dialer systems commonly used in the newspaper and cable industries. They were looking for a field tech and I was single and looking for a job so it worked out. I spent the next year and a half traveling around the country maintaining, building and installing new distributed call center dialing systems for major cable and newspaper companies.
The opportunity was incredible and I got to learn a ton. I got to learn about how the PSTN, POTS, T1/PRI, telephony and distributed systems all worked from the ground up. I would stay on site with the customer for what could be up to a couple of months building their system, debugging and training users. The opportunity came up to change roles into the production manager responsible for ordering and prebuilding telephony systems at company headquarters before they would be shipped onsite for final assembly. In that role I had the awesome opportunity to learn automation for my first time. I used the HP SmartStart scripting toolkit to automate the server builds prior to shipping. The solution used VBS to query drive sizes, lay the OS with answer file, install telephony drivers, install MSSQL, and all sorts of other functional config for the systems. Eventually I got bored of the role as I had automated the majority of it and looked for other opportunities.
Looking around on Craigslist again I was able to find a Managed Service Provider in need of a Systems Administrator. I vibed well with the owner so he took a chance on me. I grew with the MSP, servicing doctors, lawyers, mechanics, you name it, for a year and a half. Along the way I had a contract opportunity to work for a major microchip manufacturer as a linux silicon validation engineer. I took the opportunity, learned the ropes and found myself loving the work and the team.
Unfortunately, we were disbanded due to powers beyond my control and I was let go from the contract. I had few options at the time but to go back to the MSP. Fortunately the owner took me back, I picked up where I’d left, but it was barely paying the bills so I needed to continue looking for other opportunities.
I found a role working for an electronic litigation company as their sole systems engineer. I’d come in at a time where their systems were legacy and they wanted new infrastructure. I had the opportunity to spec out and build new infrastructure/domains/environments that met their needs. We ended up with nearly a half million dollar setup. A couple Dell m1000e blade centers, Cisco Nexus 5548, 10GbE, 8Gb fiberchannel Hitachi SAN, Hitachi NAS, VMWare ESX 5 cluster with dvSwitch, vMotion, svMotion, (FT/HA). After about a year and a half I grew bored of the role, the new system was built and there wasn’t much to maintaining it. It had morphed mainly into an 24/7 executive help desk type scenario. I decided to go look for an opportunity to do something on a larger scale.
Eventually I found what I was looking for in a larger enterprise (thousands of servers) sized business. I found an opportunity in the global NOC for one of the largest travel eCommerce retailers, keeping properties online, patched, deployed with updated site code, and secure. The work was incredibly stressful, the fastest pace I’ve ever encountered which was actually pretty exhilarating at times. Oh and the politics. Politics were entrenched and wore me out so I decided to move on and find another opportunity elsewhere. I did receive multiple awards for performance, teamwork, etc while in the role.
In my next role I helped establish initial configuration and connectivity for FlexPod architecture (Cisco Nexus, UCS B/C and NetApp) in a major health care providers consolidated datacenter. This position never panned out, also due to politics. We were never given the ability (permissions) to do the job we were hired to do. We were reduced to NOC monitors, but without any management framework for changes or incidents. Then came the schedule change, forcing those hired for dayshift to rotate to nightshift. This was too much change and reduction in opportunity to learn what the role had promised so I moved on when the opportunity presented itself.
Success!
In 2016, I managed to make it through multiple rounds of interviews at a major cloud provider even though I had zero production experience with cloud computing. It was life changing. As a Technical Account Manager I had an opportunity to learn the latest paradigm shifting technology that was changing the way businesses looked at computing.
To this day it is the most challenging role I’d been given the opportunity of filling. It required deep technical knowledge in multiple domains in addition to a mountain of soft skills. We had to be able to talk shop and whiteboard solutions with principal engineers, conduct meetings with C-Level stakeholders and ultimately work with everyone in between. I was part of multiple teams that were successful in securing 50+ million dollar contracts with our Enterprise customers.
As TAM’s we were the customer’s Trusted Advisor, a strategic and tactical influence, and anything else the customer needed at the time. There was little we didn’t do. Over the years I was able to keep my customers happy and my performance high so I was promoted to Enterprise Support Lead. This promotion put me in the position to mentor new TAMs as well as help them with their day-to-day challenges. There was an org restructure that would have me reporting to a different manager and working with a different set of TAMs than before but I was able to keep the same customers whom I had already been working. Shortly thereafter I was made into a Lead again, with the opportunity to help newer TAMs grow into the role.
Prior to restructure, my manager was working on my promotion. We spent the better part of a year finding and expanding on example from my day to day work. This progress was lost during the restructure and we kept getting delayed due to political reasons. It seemed those responsible for approving our promotions believed that others weren’t as capable of their roles or as impactful as they had been when filling them, so very few people were promoted for their performance. Promotions at this company are notoriously political and typically involve cult building and cult of personality approval, neither of which I was successful with. At this point I was personally bringing in more than $12 million dollars in annual revenue and more than $100K per year underpaid compared to new hires with half the industry experience. I was left with the decision to keep on grinding for skip level managers who didn’t see me, or try for the boomerang to navigate around the problem. In order for a successful boomerang, an employee must voluntarily leave the cloud provider and work elsewhere in the field as an evangelist. I was able to secure a role as senior cloud systems engineer with one of my current customers of the time, so I made my attempt.
As a Senior Cloud Systems Engineer I had the opportunity to get my hands on some new technology in production, namely Terraform and Jenkins and their associated HCL and Groovy scripting languages. I was working on a project to migrate an old Java application from an on-premises server in a datacenter to serverless technology in the cloud. The Java Engineer was not familiar with cloud technology so it was my job to familiarize him and write the code for his underlying infrastructure using Terraform and Jenkins. We worked together to build the Jenkins pipeline to compile Java with Maven and spin up the infrastructure (API Gateway, corresponding Lambdas and the Aurora Serverless database) with Terraform.
Right around the time we got this project running on the cloud, my old cloud provider manager reached out to me to see if I would be willing to come back. I was offered level advancement and significant pay increase so I really couldn’t turn down the offer.
Upon return I found myself facing a very difficult situation. I was gone for 7 months, quite a bit had changed internally and I was not given time to ramp up. The same week I came back I found myself with 4x the normal client load for a TAM, assigned by my manager. I was supporting 2 standard customers along with all 14 of a state’s public universities. I had 16 customers and the norm on the high end was 4. This was immediately as unsustainable as it sounds. Multiple days a week I had over a dozen calls scheduled with my clients, often overlapping, with no time to action any items during standard working hours. At this point I was struggling with the work load so I engaged two other fellow TAMs on my team and asked them to step in and assist me with the workload. They were able to take half the schools from me, leaving me with the other half and a more manageable workload.
At around the same time, one of my manager’s peers left the company and I was asked to fill in for him as an Enterprise Support Manager. Unbeknownst to me, this would be the beginning of my last chapter with this cloud provider. I started off really enjoying the role, mentoring TAMs, solving their challenges and unblocking customers. Then Human Resources Business Partners entered the picture. Their job was in a way entirely opposed to that of an Enterprise Support Manager. As a manager, if a TAM is burning out with too many or high-touch customers I reduce their load. Then the HRBP representative comes to me and says this individual isn’t recognizing enough revenue to justify their (perceived) lack of workload. This was a real kick in the pants, to have someone who has never filled the role and wasn’t technical tell me how to perform my job overseeing the TAM’s I’d helped to build and mentor. This didn’t sit well but I played along trying to find the middle ground and still do what I knew was best for the customer and TAM regardless of HRBP opinion.
This strategy did not play out well long term. It, amongst a couple other inappropriate situations that required me to go to HR, put me in a position to not receive support from skip level managers and I was eventually managed out of my role. I can not share the details of these undescribed situations as they could potentially cause further issues, but I can say that I was managed out of my role due to my integrity. It was an incredibly bitter pill to swallow.
Crestfallen
Now I sit here unemployed by an industry I love, overlooked for….I guess something else. Where are the companies hiring for attitude and aptitude? Why is there some new belief that accomplished industry professionals can’t learn anything new…especially those with track records of continuous learning? How did this mentality again become so prevalent?
I’ve been through quite a few interviews recently. Four of which were with one of the other major cloud providers. I was referred by a TAM I mentored at the previous cloud provider, they were building a new team locally, it looked absolutely perfect. I prepared for the interviews, studying and preparing for well over a hundred hours over a couple months. When the interview days came, I was prepared and did pretty well. I was excited after I was told that I successfully completed the first 3 round of the process and only had one remaining, a presentation. Well, before scheduling of the fourth interview took place, my referrer quit. She left the cloud provider because they shoehorned her into a role that she wasn’t excited about. So around comes the day of the 4th interview, im ultra prepared checking every box requested for the presentation and I can’t get either of the managers on the call to connect with me whatsoever. They were completely uninterested and distracted but I did the presentation as best I could, covering each of the requested topics with clarity. Well, that didn’t work out for reasons so on the hunt I go.
Next I come across a perfect cloud role at one a large investment banker. The recruiter tells me their ex-majorCloudProvider friendly, they have many previous employees and that I would be a fantastic fit with the team for my knowledge and experience. She works to setup an interview with the hiring manager and it says it’s a straight forward interview process. Just a few interviews, no presentations and that’s it. Not really much to prepare for really.
The first interview goes really well, I have an opportunity to meet the hiring manager. He seems like a really nice young guy. He asks some basic questions about my background and all goes well. He tells me I would be a great fit with my background and skillsets for the role and explains the rest of the interview process to me.
A few days later I get an email back from the recruiter who says the hiring manager loved meeting me and thinks I’m a great fit, BUT thinks I’m even a better fit for a software engineering role. I find this odd because we didn’t discuss software engineering nor does my resume show that I’m a software engineer, but a seasoned infrastructure engineer. I explain to the recruiter that software engineering isn’t really my main strength and that the original role I applied for is really where my strengths lie. No problem they say, so we proceed with setting up the interviews.
There were 3 interviews, all with different members of the team I’d be working. I was able to connect with each of them, provided expert level answers to their infrastructure and behavioral questions, design scenarios, and even trick questions. Each interviewer gave me their version of positive feedback during their interviews leaving me with a positive outlook. They seemed to have gone very well. As an aside, I’d like to put this into context when I say that the interviews went well. Working for major cloud provider I had personally conducted over a hundred interviews and participated in hundreds more. I’m intimately familiar. We talked shop once they learned of this experience and they left me with the impression they were impressed with my skills and knowledge, even saying so on occasion.
I was left feeling like I had a positive interaction with my interviewers and that it really could not have gone any better. I was able to connect, relate and laugh with each of them and I provided quality answers that impressed on occasion. Fantastic!
Apparently not so fantastic! I heard back today from the recruiter that they went with someone who more closely has the skills their looking for in the role. I’m absolutely baffled from a logic perspective. Obviously, I can’t be privy to all the situations that a manager is dealing with during a hire, but what happened here defies reasonable logic. They assured me they have several positions open for this one role, so they interviewed and hired all of them faster than they could get me through the process and they were all more qualified for the role? I find this incredibly disingenuous and extremely distasteful in an already suspect job market. I’m getting to the point where I’m having difficulty maintaining faith in a system that ignores reasonable logic. Businesses can’t be bothered to put forward good faith efforts when their fighting the front lines of the class war, can they? How do you plan to hire quality talent if you can’t help but treat experienced qualified professionals like the dog shit?
What is going on?
What is going on in the IT market that has made it so bad? Is it the influx of workers who are merely here for the paycheck yet insist on working from home with 3 years of industry experience? Is it the influx of short-sighted CEO’s who can’t see past 2 years into the future and their unrelenting push for ever exceeding growth and profit (greed) ? Is it the deification of capitalist investors the likes of Shark Tank that have somehow convinced people that greed is cool and fashionable? Where did the humanity go in this industry? IT is an art, where did all the artists go? Are we just commodities these days with all the fake petitioning for H1B’s by these greedy people and greedy corporations? Sadly I think I know the answer.