Employer Dissolving My Position

My employer (which has remained nameless, thus far) has chosen to go ahead and dissolve the physical position (and by extension, my employment) of web developer.

A certain high-powered person has made the decision to sub-contract a company (for now, nameless) to take care of the work for them. Completely. This will obviously render the posistion of staff web developer completely pointless, which is why I will be shown the door.

I think it’s a pretty dangerous thing when you start empowering third-party entities to control your assets, which is exactly what my employer is doing.

The way I found out about this master genius plan is what really gets me. I was sitting at work minding my own business when a teacher I know asked me “Hey, so I heard they are taking the web-site away from you. What happened?” — you see, this guy likes to joke around, so I didn’t take it seriously. Then a teacher came into my office asking for A/V help. I told her I could not help her since “I’m just the web guy.” Her response was, “oh are you that new web guy they just hired?”… my response.. “just hired? new? I’ve been here.. for 2 years.” At this point I knew something fishy was going on.

Apparently, this huge decision was made by one man, who then proceeded to petition for approval from the board of directors…. and because this man is among the most powerful persons with the company, he has inherent leeway with things he wants to do. Assuming the board is comprised of people that aren’t up to par with today’s technology, which does not enable them to make informed decisions about something as severe as this. Does the company not realize they are forfeiting majority control of their biggest public relations asset? Whenever they want something done, they have to submit that and it’ll get done “when it get done.” They won’t have things instantly done when and how they want. Anytime the director of public information had something for me, it was up within minutes. If it was something more involved, it was up within a day. I surely hope this company knows they are in for.

What also ticks me off is now this explains why they kept blocking my projects. I had a project in place that could have theoretically saved the company quite a bit of money per year. I already had the stuff started off, but the implementation of it would’ve required policy change in each building within the organization — which is more work than its worth if they knew for a while they were planning on getting rid of my work. Which is exactly what they are doing. Everything that I have worked on will be meeting the recycling bin and go down the drain.

When I took this job, the website was a barren waste land. I turned it around and developed a brand new innovative content management system specifically for the district. I took the liberty of setting up a testing/development environment server to take care of the development/code changes before they get rolled to the production public server — something that was never down before — something that known of the previous web developers knew/bothered to do. I fixed up errors and the “growing pains” that occured with moving the website to a new server that was due to shotty code written by the first group of web masters. All by myself. What do I get? Nothing. Not even benefits. No paid time off. Just crappy treatment from my co-workers and continous obstacles that are placed to prevent me from doing what I need to do.

I should have honestly figured this out sooner. The company is not taking my employment seriously, because I made myself into an expendable asset by not fighting for what I deserve. I work full-time hours for this company, but they insist on having me officially labeled as a part time employer, which legally means they have less responsibilities — they don’t have to give me benefits or any honors and treatment they give to full time employees. You remember the black mold issue and how long it took them to fix that.. and how much office-political bull crap I had to put up with just for THEM, my employer to deal with a severe health concern in the workplace. Seriously, they knew about the incident before I was an employee here, and I sent my own  requests in (filed them with the building administrator’s secretary) Obviously, I was not important to them, but I should have figured this out back then. But I guess hindsight is always 20/20.

As for my timeline — I have no idea. They still need someone to maintain the website right now. The contract is not finalized, and it will take a bit of time for them to construct the new webpage. But see, any new enhancements I make will all be done in vain… as by the time it’s implemented the system will be erased from existence. I was working on a YouTube-style video system  that would’ve been very innovative for my company’s website.. but now I don’t see the point in exerting myself. But hey, it’s their company. Whatever the hell they want.

See this is what happens when companies choose the easy way out of things and make it someone else’s problem. The little people get screwed.. while the big people get six figure salaries and sport cars can sit back. Niccceeee.

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