because not enough websites start with the letter “Z”
Posted in life on Aug 29th, 2008
In early July I was called to a meeting at DST Human Resources (HR) to discuss my position. DST, a large corporation, is half owner of Argus Health Systems, which is the company I work for. Ever since I joined Argus in January 2007 there has been some upheaval, including a major project cancellation, several reorganizations of the Information Technology [...]
Posted in life on Aug 18th, 2008
The recent upheaval in my employment has knocked me off my emotional center; it is hard to think coherently about my upcoming choice.
Sometime this week, or early next I will be presented with one or more opportunities to accept a new position. The choices as they stand today are, in no particular order:
* Software Engineer [...]
Posted in life on Aug 18th, 2008
For the past six weeks or so I have been participating in a placement program at my employer. My position was eliminated and this program is designed to locate a new position for me within the company. While I applaud the thinking behind the program - that it is better to retain employees than to [...]
Posted in life on Aug 14th, 2008
Throughout my career I have been fascinated with process. At a certain level of abstraction my job is nothing but implementing processes, big and small, to achieve some goal. After spending twenty-five years examining existing processes to understand them, and designing new automated processes to replace or augment them, I tend to see processes everywhere. [...]
Posted in life on Jul 2nd, 2008
Every semester in college, when the new course catalog was issued, you got to look for classes to take following the break. There was always an anticipation in this process. Reading the course descriptions, matching offerings up to your schedule, and wondering if Psychology 101 was really as bad as everyone said.
This week I am [...]
Posted in life on Apr 30th, 2008
Recently I have been dealing with a particularly egregious form of spam - technical recruiter emails. One company in particular, Talentberg, stands out for its lack of professionalism and ignorance. They absolutely refuse to prune their mailing list, even when repeated requests are made. And they attempt to justify their actions through an intimidating, if false, [...]
Posted in life on Apr 18th, 2008
There are any number of differences between working as a consultant and working as an employee. And there are some similarities. Today I ran across an unexpected similarity. The company I work for now, as an employee, has undergone significant growth in the past couple of years and they are going through all the growing [...]
Posted in life on Apr 14th, 2008
After thirty-one years of getting paper paychecks or pay stubs, tomorrow will mark the first occasion of my receiving an electronic pay statement. My employer, in an effort to avoid paying the increased mass mailing postage rate, has decided to stop mailing associates, who use direct deposit, pay stubs. Over the course of a year [...]
The company I work for has two buildings in downtown Kansas City. The primary location has its own underground garage with two levels of parking for those associates who work there. The garage isn’t large enough to accommodate everyone, so some associates are given a leased space in the public garage across the street. The [...]
A year ago today I started my current job. For the first time in a seven years I was a full-time employee rather than a consultant, and for the first time in a decade I was changing jobs without moving cross-country in the process.
It has been an interesting first year. The project I joined as [...]
