Family medical leave: Day 13. Truthfully, there wasn’t much work happening during the holidays, so the time off already feels like much longer. Let’s call it a full month already. There’s been no let up in household chores and ministering to my sick wife, I’m busy as hell.
The project we were working on was at risk of not getting renewed in 2025, but the rest of my team, minus me, was renewed until June, supposedly. That hurts—it would have benefitted me to remain on the assignment given our family circumstances. It’s important to not take business matters personally. My family’s struggles were compartmentalized, not shared with colleagues, but the constant medical appointments were impossible to conceal. In the corporate world, weakness is quickly smoked out and exploited. They broomed me as quickly as possible once it was known that my personal life was causing distraction. It did not matter to them that missed time was made up on evenings and weekends. It also didn’t matter that I had done solid work for them over the past two years.
None of what I just wrote may be true. I received high praise as feedback from the manager. But that just makes me more suspicious in the sense that nobody is going to offer any constructive feedback when a simple thumbs up will suffice and no more questions. Obviously nothing got screwed up by me, which is favorable. The rest could simply be that the client was looking at dollar signs and four bodies was costing too much. It still feels like the weak animal at the watering hole got targeted by the lions. Exemplar of what was mentioned before—the game is a tiger by the tail and you have to hang on for dear life if you want to stay in another day. Is this the moment I “got old?” Perhaps it is.
These eyes bear witness to colleagues in other times and places who were dealing with serious family health issues receiving similar treatment from an employer. On one occasion, a colleague had a sick spouse (also cancer, as I recall) and was laid off. At least he got some severance and then unemployment. That’s never worked out for me, not even once. Another time, there was a “Boomer” fellow who was simply set aside at work—not given any challenging assignments and left to sit in a cubicle with little to do. He was still drawing a paycheck until the next round of layoffs came, then he was gone. It was nothing he did except he aged. That was his sin. Once you have witnessed these actions, it is difficult to not become cynical about our nation and its corporate fascism. The fresh, young hires do not understand and can not empathize because they have not lived it. We all want to be valuable, needed, even desired. It is difficult when that time comes where we are cast aside.
Was my work slipping? My self doubt creeps in. But no, technically it was not the work output that was slipping. Perhaps it was my sanity. Originally, I was the de facto leader of the consulting team. But as priorities shifted and personal issues rose, that role was ceded to another and he became the spokesman for the team and moved the ball further. My role diminished, I drifted into the background. It was also done for conflict avoidance—one particular personality on their full time staff had some personality problems (BPD?1) and was often argumentative with me. He didn’t like the challenges our team brought to his silo and didn’t like that automation was threatening that silo. What he viewed as job security, we viewed as risky snowflake configurations requiring correction. It was never going to be anything but a hostile relationship. We won a pyrrhic victory in the sense that the management that hired us demanded the solutions we were providing which overrode the opinions of the lower level employees. It enraged them. Unfortunately for us, we had to interact with those lower level folks on a day to day basis. The manager over us was a no-show and the Director above him also a no-show. Thus, there was no one to effectively manage the conflicts other than a project manager who I must say was among the wackiest people I have ever been around. Nothing is ever straightforward. It is likely that once our remaining team is out the door there, all the work we did will be abandoned very quickly and they will revert to the dysfunction that the full timers appear to enjoy. You see, in IT, dysfunction is a shield from accountability, and those people there are geniuses in terms of avoiding accountability. “It wasn’t our fault, everything is broken and look how many hours we are working to keep it all going!” The VP who hired us saw all of it, but without effective middle management to take on the cultural shift, it doesn’t matter what he sees or knows. I predict a Chapter 11 in that company’s future. It doesn’t seem like their issues will ever get fixed and between the brain drain and the rot in their business model, the future is predictable. It will take awhile for it all to grind to a halt, but clearly it’s happening.
Yes, I’m still angry about all of it. It takes for it to wear off. It’s not that it was personal, but rather the work becomes personal and being unable to see it through to some logical end state is upsetting. It feels like failure. I wanted so badly for them to admonish me or to confront whatever the disconnect was, but there is never much in the way of closure. You learn a whole bunch of tech stuff and then forget it all and that’s that. It is what drives alcoholism and opioid addiction in our society. Never any closure, never any healing. Only pain.
What next? No way to be sure right now. It’s winter, it’s cold, my family obligations are severely hampering any efforts towards being employable. My wife has a feeding tube and as her chief caregiver, it is my unpleasant duty to make sure she stays fed. She’s recovering, just very slowly. 2025 is going to be challenging for me professionally. I’ll turn 52 in the Spring, and I’m now the dinosaur. What a sad country—it doesn’t matter how clever or even brilliant you are, it only matters how young and exploitable you happen to be. This revelation about the IT field was found out too late to change course. I may yet find a new path, I’m working on it.
Borderline Personality Disorder, a disorder that appears to be common amongst people in the IT profession for some odd reason. Having a psychology background might be a better fit for these jobs versus a degree in Computer Science.