Unemployed blogging from Colorado

So, I am no longer an employee of the company I had been working for up until about a week ago, and while I'm not too upset, I'm still a little ... raw. I wasn't planning on staying for that long anyway, but I wish, so as to save myself a little stress, that it could have been more on my terms.

So, my performance evaluation was scheduled for Friday. My company has recently switched to a consultant-preferred competitive system that looks something like as follows:

479
268
135

Where each number in that box represents a quadrant, with bottom to top representing increasing leadership qualities, while left to right represents increasing results-based performance. 1 is the worst box to be in and 9 is the best.

My performance evaluation last year was not stellar. I was a 3 box, with my team leader fairly apologetic about where he felt I was versus where I felt I deserved to be. I hadn't been given much of a chance to prove myself. The evaluation took place in March, but covered the previous calendar year, so it missed three months that had passed. John, my team leader, explicitly stated that based on my year-to-date performance, because of a project I was leading, I was looking at at least a 6-box, possibly even an 8, or even a 9 if I really knocked my project out of the park.

I feel like I did. The project itself didn't go well, and at times the delays were due to electrical issues, which were my responsibility, but all things being equal, I felt I did a job few engineers at the company would have been able to pull off. I was given shit for prints, shit for installation documents, parts were missed, designs were changed at the last second to shit that didn't work, there were no design reviews, and basically I was hung out to dry. Despite that, I brought the fucking project home, delivering 4 very functional, running, producing machines out of very difficult, complex, and differentiated projects. Then, to top it off, at the end of the year, when I was assigned to a project that I had no early involvement in, but was given a heap of responsibilities toward, every single one of those responsibilities that I had went off with very minimal hitches, while other electrical issues that I was not assigned to languished for months, resulting in a machine that still isn't up and running.

So, I felt like I'd done pretty well. Apart from a couple of minor, isolated mistakes, I'd received nothing but positive feedback from John all year, but John was transferred, sometime around September, up to Wisconsin, and Scott, a newbie team leader, took his place. John was still responsible for writing the performance evaluation, and I was expecting something around a 6 box.

So Friday rolls around, performance evaluation time. I head to Scott's office, and he says, "We want to grab a conference room", which is odd, since with John I always did my performance evaluations in his office. So he grabs a conference room that happens to be located near the HR offices. I raise my eyebrows, Scott doesn't say much, he just leads me in and tells me to take a seat. Then he says he's got to go find Rosie. I just give a contemptuous guffaw. I know what that means. Rosie is the head HR person in the plant, who I barely know, but know enough to know I'm not missing much.

It takes him a while to find her, and he comes back in the room, and says she's coming. By this point I'm slouched in my chair, eyeing Scott, giving him a look that says "You know you're not going to get out of this bullshit unscathed." Finally Rosie enters the room and Scott starts up, flipping past the page that has the visual representation of my box. I see that I am a 1 box.

I laugh. "What a joke."

Scott ignores this, and starts in, "Well, Greg, from this evaluation it is pretty clear that you're not meeting expectations..."

"What expectations am I not meeting?" I interrupt. "I mean, specifically."

"Well, from your objectives it seems that your primary responsibility this year was the ARIES project..."

"...which I delivered to near-perfection, given the circumstances."

"Well, the review appears to disagree."

"Then the review is bullshit," I spout out, knowing full well where the discussion was going and deciding that it was now or never to get my licks in. "The prints that were delivered to me were late, and described completely non-functional circuitry that needed to be rebuilt from the ground up, even as the installation was commencing. The work breakdowns and wirepulls I was given were worthless. Everything had to be created from scratch. Software was faulty. The project was as screwed up as a project can be, and despite this, I delivered working machines with an extreme minimum of downtime. P6 was down for an extra week because of electrical complications. P5, which was not my responsibility, was down for an extra three months. What do you think the difference was?"

No answer. I don't think either of the two of them are used to dealing with an engineer that commands the least bit of loquatiousness.

"Furthermore, I find it incredible that anyone can justify placing me in the 1-box when I was not given anything more than a couple of cursory correction-mistakes as negative feedback throughout the course of the entire year, while I can provide more than half-a-dozen specific attaboys from John. I'm of the opinion that a performance review, particularly a negative one, should not come as a surprise. Wouldn't you agree?"

"I would," Scott said.

Rosie chose now to pipe in, and clarified that I had received no coaching throughout the specific year. I said, no, not for anything more than a couple of relatively minor mistakes, and that I would presume I wasn't being put in the 1-box for a couple of minor mistakes. She agreed, and asked me to clarify again, saying she found that hard to believe.

"Are you saying I'm lying?" I boomed, raising my voice up to a shout and flinching in her direction. She recoiled a bit.

"I'm saying I find that very unusual."

"Then it's unusual. It's also the truth. The fact of the matter is, everybody in this room knows I was not put in the 1-box for anything related to my performance. It's preposterous to think that my performance on the ARIES project was anything less than meeting expectations, and quite reasonable to say that I exceeded every expectation that was thrown at me in the past twelve months. Therefore the system is broken."

"But here we are," she said.

"Do you acknowledge that the system is broken?" I asked.

"I think that this review represents an opinion of you from a different perspective."

"Then that perspective is wrong."

And on and on, like that. I had Rosie all but cowering by the end of it, as I:

- Blasted the company for its talent building, at one point saying that the competitive ratings system had turned the entire plant into a "bunch of greedy little knowledge-hoarders, desperately trying to hold onto their own little islands."

- Stated that, unlike Rosie, those of us that did actual work sometimes had trouble scheduling bullshit meetings, particularly when we were in the middle of a 12-day stretch of back shifts, and had informal channels of communication open anyways.

- Accused the ratings system of making a blatantly political and tactical decision based on the common knowledge that I was not particularly happy with my job: "why waste good raise money on someone that might not be around soon anyway?" They didn't deny this.

And so on, for about an hour. Eventually Rosie put a stop to it, and brought up the options about where we could go from here. She said we could put me on a constant performance monitoring system, or I could leave voluntarily here and now. Not a hard choice; I knew that if I didn't leave then, I probably wouldn't get an opportunity, and I don't want it on my record that I've ever been fired. So I signed my resignation, handed in my badge, and walked out right then and there, with the parting shot of "Fuck this bullshit, you'll never get any quality engineers to stay if you keep treating them like you're treating them. I can do better than this shit."

And so, I get paid for one more month that I don't have to work, which is nice, plus I get paid for all my unused vacation, which year-to-date is 120 hours, also nice. Almost two months' pay forthcoming. And I have a very active lead at an engineering firm that hired a lot of ex-employees of my company, where I know quite a few people and have a stellar reputation. I imagine what it will take to get hired there will be a brief phone call, a flight, and a quick, informal interview. I interview well, and my resume will be 100% what they're looking for. They still have job postings up and I know through the grapevine that they have a specific need for Wonderware experts; I have a general reputation as one of the most knowledgeable Wonderware developers around.

So, all in all, the ending of my current job should be very good for me. I was planning on leaving soon anyway, but do kinda sorta wish that it had been more on my own terms, and that it would have left me with less of a bitter taste in my mouth. I have plenty of money saved up (at least, for the immediate time being), and have a 401k worth a great deal that I could potentially dip into if things got really bad, but chances are I will be up and employed again soon. In fact, chances are high that I will ask for a couple of months off, just to take a break, get my house ready to sell, and play poker and video games. I could be all about going to work again sometime in July.

But for now, I'm in Colorado, in the annual tradition that my friend Brian throws together, in the form of a ski trip where we stay at his parents' (beautiful, beautiful) house. But more on that later. Bedtime, and the slopes are calling tomorrow.