Bullet Points

• Third-party personnel recruiters work with companies that are searching for one or more employees.
• Third-party recruiters work on a commission basis, with the commission typically amounting to about 20 to 25 percent of the employee’s first-year salary.
• Third party recruiters are put in the delicate position of having to reconcile two sets of interests, those of the company and those of the candidate. In most cases, the interests of the company win out because the company is the one that pays the recruiter.
• Third party recruiters often have specialties, such as finding executives or technical employees. They may even specialize in very specific niches such as finding C++ programmers or engineers with government security clearances.
• Never work with an employment agency that charges you a fee.
• The song Amanda, by the band Boston, was their biggest hit. It reached number one on the singles chart in 1986.

The feeling takes so long to grow

After the contract with the megacorporation ended, the job market hit a short-term slump, at least locally. I had only one real suitor for a new position. It was a start-up out of Silicon Valley called eStamp. We had a slow courtship. I heard from them about every two weeks. The first call was from a recruiter, Amanda. Amanda was enthusiastic. She made the job sound fantastic and my chances sound great. The company she represented specialized in online stamp / mailing label sales. They needed a lead technical writer with strong web skills. Amanda liked my resume and my web site, so she decided that I was the perfect fit. The job paid a lot of money, $87,000 a year plus 1000 shares of stock per year for four years. I understood that the Bay Area housing market was pricy, but this seemed like enough money for me to live comfortably on and I liked the idea of moving to the nerve center of the geek universe. I also liked the idea of having a full-time job rather than a contract.

About two weeks passed before I had my first phone interview and another two weeks after that the company called for a follow-up interview. Both interviews went well, so they decided to fly me out to meet the crew for one final round of interviews. The trip took about two weeks to set up, of course. When I got there, everyone seemed enthusiastic and I came away feeling good. After the xenophobic atmosphere of the megacorporation, this little startup seemed downright friendly.

I’m gonna take you by surprise

Once I got home, however, another two weeks passed before I heard from them. Eventually, Amanda called to let me know that they wanted to hire me, but they were dropping their offer to $77,000. They wanted me to prove myself before they made me lead technical writer. It was a bit of a slap in the face. I had never had anyone cut their offer before.

If there had been any other opportunities brewing, I might have turned their offer down, but I needed work. I didn’t have any money left in my account. I told them that if they were going to drop my pay, then I needed a relocation allowance get me out there. At first they didn’t want to give it to me. They didn’t like the idea of laying out any money in advance. The company eventually agreed to give me $2000, but they wanted to put restrictions on it. The main sticking point was that they wanted the money back if I didn’t last at least six months. I was perfectly willing to give the money back if I quit, but I would not agree to repay them if they fired me or if I was laid off. Amanda was unsympathetic. She accused me of plotting to use eStamp to get to California where I could get a better-paying job. I explained to her that I was happy to repay them if I quit, but not if they decided to get rid of me. They were two separate issues. She told me she didn’t see the difference, but she would take my demand to them anyway. It was frustrating, and the days kept passing.

Tomorrow may be too late

I was about to cave in. I needed the job. I began to pack my stuff and I even signed the contract, but I left it on my desk rather than fax it to them. Amanda was supposed to give me eStamp’s final word on my request by the end of the day. I had decided that, no matter what their final offer was, I was going to take it and give the job my best shot.

At about two o’clock that afternoon, I got a phone call from a different recruiter – a local recruiter. This recruiter said she represented a major computer company that needed a new writer by Monday. I told her that was great, but if they wanted me, I needed an answer within three hours because I had another offer I was planning to take. Within ten minutes I was on the phone with the computer company’s technical communications manager and one of their writers. Within an hour my fax machine was spitting out a contract for a brand new job. Instead of heading blindly to Silicon Valley, I would be driving twenty minutes to a research park on the southeast side of Tucson. It was a contract job, and it paid less money, but I wouldn’t have to move.

I don’t wanna lose you

Amanda called at about four o’clock that afternoon. She was abrupt and irritated. She had decided to take a hard line with me. “They aren’t going to give in on this, so I need your answer now, yes or no.”

I took a breath. “I guess this isn’t going to work out then. Thank you for trying.”

“WHAT?”

To say that Amanda was upset would be a gross understatement. Amanda screamed. Amanda pouted. Amanda argued. It got even worse when she realized I was taking a position that paid less than their offer. I explained to her that this job didn’t require me to move. I could keep paying my dirt-cheap Tucson rent, so financially I would be better off. At some point Amanda started to cry. She accused me of leading her on. She called me a liar. She begged me to change my mind.

I stayed calm. I reminded her that eStamp had dragged their feet for almost two months. They had even dropped their offer. Once Amanda realized I wasn’t going to change my mind, she demanded that I call the manager at eStamp myself to tell her I wasn’t taking the job. This is not the sort of thing recruiters make applicants do, ever, but I agreed to do it just to get her off the phone.

There’s something I just have to say

I called the manager and let her know I was taking another job. The manager took it in stride. “This is the Silicon Valley,” the manager said, “it happens all the time. I don’t know why she was so upset.” The manager wished me luck in my new position and that was that. It was a strange day. I was thrilled to have a new job (and a local one at that) but I was also emotionally drained. I had never had a recruiter go through a meltdown before.

I was once again a gainfully employed technical writer. I had gone from a megacorporation to an even larger company. It was a company that had once been fabled for both its size and its culture. Even after ten years of layoffs, it was still one of the largest companies in the world. They were the stuff of legends. The glory days had since passed, but I was still going to be working for The Big Mothership. We’ll call it TBM. Now, the adventure was truly about to begin…

Further Reading

A Boston Technical Recruiters Blog: Even recruiters blog. There is some good advice here.

Deceptive Recruiting: HR’s Last Stand? A discussion of recruiter ethics

Questions

What experiences have you had with recruiters?

What is the longest period you’ve ever had to wait between an interview and a job offer?

Have you ever had to personally turn down an employer?

Bullet Points

• Megacorporation is a term popularized by the cyberpunk novels of William Gibson. It denotes a multi-national corporation that has become so large that in many cases it is its own customer or even its own government. Megacorporations often come complete with their own military. These companies are considered to be fictional, but the company I worked at had a U.S. Army base in its parking lot, so I will let you be the judge.
• Cubicle farm is a term popularized by Scott Adams of Dilbert fame. It describes an enormous room partitioned off by low fabric walls that separate workers (but not sound). These cubicles are approximately the same size and dimensions as the stalls that farms use to house large animals. Another farm-related term for a cubicle is veal-fattening pen which was popularized by Douglas Adams in the book Generation X.
• A disaster recovery plan is a plan for resuming key business functions (such as payroll and accounting) after a catastrophic disruption in operations. Such a plan presumes that no specific team member can be reached or contribute to the recovery, so all processes must be independently executable.
• An extended stay hotel caters to business travelers who are in need of short to long-term housing. The rooms tend to come with kitchens, free local phone service, weekly or twice-weekly maid service, and on-site laundry facilities. The better hotels have full cable television, concierge service, a pool and free continental breakfast. I wasn’t at one of the better ones.
• Phoenix, Arizona regularly reaches temperatures above 110 degrees in the summer.

Welcome to the Machine

The branch of the megacorporation that I worked at was housed in a low-slung building that stretched on for at least a quarter-mile. My cubicle was in a warehouse-sized room that seemed to never end. At least 400 of us worked in this vast cubicle farm. My stall was located across the aisle from a flock of customer support personnel who serviced the Asian branches of the company. At any time during the day, I could hear a cacophony of languages that I didn’t understand a word of.

Their customer service work had nothing to do with my job, and not a single person in my row greeted me when I arrived or said anything beyond hello at any point during my stay. The only time I ever heard from any of them was when one of their herd sent an e-mail asking me to stop snapping my gum. I was chewing ginseng gum at the time in an effort to curb hunger pains as part of my most recent ridiculous diet. Apparently none of them were willing to ask me to stop directly. That would have required speaking to me. I was greatly amused to discover that my noise distracted them as much as their noise distracted me. I didn’t stop chewing the gum but I did try to back off on the snapping – a little.

Fly Casual

It turned out that writing service level agreements wasn’t as boring as I thought it was. It was geometrically more boring than I thought it was. I wasn’t even writing the materials. A friendly but bland middle manager wrote them up. All I had to do was read through the documents and fix the grammar, usage and formatting. I then sent the documents back to the friendly but bland middle manager and if he had any questions, he emailed them back to me. We rarely saw each other.

The work itself would have made for a dreadfully dull job, but the real problem was that he only produced something for me to edit about every three weeks. The remaining days were spent trying to look busy without using the Internet. If I didn’t look busy or if people saw me use the Internet, people complained. They didn’t complain to me. They didn’t talk to me at all. They complained to my friendly but bland middle-manager. This would result in an email from him. The friendly but bland middle manager sympathized with my lack of work, and he never seemed angry, but he made it clear that I could only use the Internet “during lunch”. To cope with my boredom, I brought in books on web development and FrameMaker. I also read whatever SAP guides they had lying around. It helped me to look busy, and I did learn a few things, but the days just dragged by.

Summer in the City

In addition to being bored at work, I was also bored when I got off work. I still considered Tucson to be my home, but I needed a place to stay in Phoenix. I rented a room by the week at an extended stay hotel. The room was decent, if ugly. It had a framed picture on the wall that I was sure contained a carpet remnant. It had a kitchen, but I never bothered to cook. I mainly lived off of Subway sandwiches (it worked for Jared) and Gatorade along with a refrigerator shelf full of the Kirkland brand diet drink. I had begun the job in the middle of July and the temperature rarely dipped under 100 degrees even in the middle of the night, so I never felt like going anywhere. For the most part I came home and watched baseball on the television or went for a swim. I scribbled some poetry in my journal then went to bed.

By late September I gave up on living in Phoenix and started driving up from Tucson every day. I did this mainly because it killed time and I could at least see my friends and family for an hour or two. I began listening to books on tape as I drove: A Brief History of Time, The Razor’s Edge, The Lord of the Rings trilogy (plus The Hobbit), the Interview with a Vampire series. Books on tape kept me going. All the driving was exhausting though. By late October the temperature had cooled somewhat, and I spent many of my lunch hours over the fall and winter months sleeping in my car. The office building was under the approach to Sky Harbor Airport. I watched the planes cruise in above me, one every thirty seconds, until I fell asleep. It was just like counting sheep.

Flirtin’ With Disaster

Because I had nothing to do, and therefore no good reason to say no, the bland but friendly middle manager started sending me to meetings to take notes for him. I considered this to be secretarial work, and told him so, but it was still more pleasant than sitting in my cubicle trying to look busy. Most of these meetings were the standard megacorporation time-wasters. A roomful of people would gather to argue over timelines, statuses and budgets.

One group managed to capture my interest — the Disaster Recovery Team (DRT). The DRT (pronounced dirt) met every week to work on a plan for what to do if the central SAP site was destroyed and everyone was either dead or missing. This was a megacorporation, and it had a worldwide organization to run whether we were at the bottom of a smoking crater or not. I volunteered to write the disaster recovery plan. They had set up collocations for the servers in Illinois and an archive storage facility in upstate New York. We put together a plan to reassemble this information if a disaster struck. We all agreed, quite rightly, that the priority would be the payroll department. The processes I documented were dry, but the meetings were fun because we got to spend a lot of time thinking of ways in which the site could be destroyed: earthquakes, fires, riots, chemical attacks, nuclear attacks, even disgruntled workers. We decided that a gun-toting employee did not rise to the level of disaster and was therefore outside of our scope. All of this speculation helped me to pass the days.

Goodbye Stranger

Beyond those moments, the job never did get interesting. After about eight months the friendly but bland middle manager called me in to let me know they were terminating my contract early. They didn’t have anything for me to do. He was nice enough to give me a month’s notice so I didn’t make waves about the “year contract” I had agreed to. Arizona is a right-to-work state, so I really didn’t have any recourse anyway. They could have let me go at any time.

I sent my resume out to the usual suspects, but the month passed without a nibble. To tell the truth, I wasn’t that disappointed. The daily drive and the boredom had left me exhausted and burnt out. I needed a break. The week after the job ended, my health caught up to me. I came down with a severe case of the flu and I barely got out of bed for almost a month. I laid in bed and read, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, about a dozen times. Getting lost in the woods of northern Maine seemed oddly similar to having a never-ending bout with the flu. It was quite a while before I felt like myself again, and by then I was in desperate need of another job. It was right about then that Silicon Valley called and asked me out on a date. Would it be a Love Connection?

Further Reading

• Douglas Coupland’s Generation X Neo-logisms: Coupland provided many terms for corporate culture and job dissatisfaction including Anti-Sabbatical, Consensus Terrorism, McJob, Mid-Twenties Breakdown, Rebellion Postponement, and Sick Building Migration.
• Step by Step Guide for Disaster Recovery Planning: A good introduction to planning and writing a disaster recovery plan.
• Service Level Agreements: An overview of Service Level Agreements from the folks at ZDnet.

Questions

• What experiences have you had with large corporations?
• Have you ever been housed in a cubicle farm?
• What is your ideal (realistic) corporate environment? Do you consider one to be possible?
• Would it be a good idea to create a personal disaster recovery plan?

Bullet Points

• The more relaxed you are, the better a job interview tends to go
• Subject knowledge is great, but tools skills help you land jobs
• A service level agreement (SLA) is a document that describes the performance criteria a provider promises to meet while delivering a service.

The Next Interview

I drove to Phoenix to interview for a contract at a company that specialized in providing computer services and training. This company was a major player in the services field, but the place was decidedly less fancy than the one that had flown me into Dallas. The corporate location doubled as a call center. Like most call centers, the walls were covered with motivational sayings and banners pushing sales level contests and company pride. I couldn’t help but think of my experiences with the Help Desk manager at PHPS who wanted me to be a high-energy technical writer with a big smile on my face. The manager at this company, however, was decidedly low-energy. He was overweight and unkempt — exactly the sort of geek I was comfortable working with.

We went over my experience and I showed him my newly improved portfolio. He seemed happy with it. He asked me the standard questions about past experience and work styles. He seemed to like my answers and I felt as if I was a good fit for what they were looking for. At the end of the interview he asked how soon I could be available if they decided they needed me. “Next week,” I told him. He nodded and shook my hand. I wasn’t sure if I had the job, but I felt better about this interview than I did about the interview in Dallas. When I got home, there was a message on my voice mail from the recruiter. She said that the manager had been very impressed. He had one more interview left to do, but I was the front-runner.

A few minutes later, I received a phone call from another Phoenix recruiter. This recruiter wanted to know if I was available for an interview today. I told her that I had just gotten back from Phoenix. I couldn’t handle driving back up there again that day, but I would be happy to come in the next day. She set up a meeting for eight the next morning.

Mega-Corporation

It was another contract position. This interview was with a mega-corporation that had more fingers in more pies than you can imagine. The first two companies I had interviewed with were in the Fortune 500, but this one was in the top ten. It not only had a substantial retail and manufacturing presence, it was also a major military contractor. The location I interviewed at came complete with its own little U.S. Army base.

I interviewed with two people, a manager and a writer. The writer had accepted another position, and they were looking for someone to replace her. Of my three interviews, this was the most relaxed. I was fairly sure that I had the other job and it showed. I sat back in my chair and listened to the two of them pitch the position. They told me that I would be writing supporting documentation for a major SAP (a finance and administration package for large companies) conversion project. Much of my work would be service level agreements and planning documents. It sounded like a dull job to me, but I didn’t say that in the interview. I stayed positive. My interviewers were mainly concerned with my Microsoft Word and FrameMaker skills. I told them I had once been a Microsoft Word trainer, and that everything in my portfolio was created in FrameMaker. That was what they wanted to hear. I walked out of the meeting feeling good.

An Offer I Couldn’t Refuse

That afternoon I got feedback on all three of my interviews. The interview in Dallas had been a bust, just as I suspected. They didn’t like my sample and they didn’t think I was a good fit for the company. The recruiter seemed slightly annoyed with me, and reminded me that my beach time would end with the next check. I was no longer their employee. Both Phoenix interviews, however, resulted in job offers. The computer services company offered me $25 per hour for a six-month contract that could extend “indefinitely”. The megacorporation offered me the same amount, but for a year contract. I told the recruiter and account manager for the megacorporation that I preferred the other contract. The duration was shorter, but the work sounded more interesting to me. I told them I didn’t want to spend the next year of life writing service level agreements and such.

The account manager asked if a higher offer might persuade me. I told her it might, but that I planned to accept the other offer as soon as I got off the phone. She asked me to wait a half hour. Forty-five minutes later, she called back. She upped the offer to $30 an hour plus a $240 a week tax-free mileage allowance for my travel expenses. I still wasn’t too thrilled with the work, but I needed the money (my debts were far from paid off) so I took the offer. Little did I know that I would soon be flirting with disaster…

Further Reading

Technical Writing – Finding Jobs Through Agencies by Ugur Akinci, Ph.D.: Additional information on what to consider when using a consulting agency in your technical writing job search.

Questions

• If you had to choose between a moderate paying job that sounded interesting or a much higher paying job that sounded dull, which would you choose?
• Would your answer change if you were deep in debt or completely out of debt?

Note: This post was originally a part of the last post in the series, Planes, Trainers and Automobiles but was separated because it ran too long. The two posts are really companion pieces.

Bullet Points

• Beach time and bench time refer to paid or unpaid time off between consulting contracts
• When you are a contractor, it is best to take initiative and find other options no matter how much you trust your recruiter
• Never trust a company to have your best interests in mind

The Waiting Game

I did not expect to be without a new position for as long as I was. Because I was still employed by my contract agency, I was still being paid, even though I wasn’t doing any work. Some companies call this beach time. Other companies call this bench time. I was under the impression that beach time would be a strong motivator for the company to find me another job, but several weeks passed without an interview. I called about once a week to check in with my company. Most of the time I got the answering machine because my account manager was never in. Other than that I didn’t hear from them. Either out of loyalty or laziness, I didn’t start looking for positions on my own. I worked on my novel, redesigned my web site and played a lot of pool. I think I played Sim City 2000 for about a week straight. I didn’t start to worry until the checks stopped coming.

Fighting for my rights

Apparently TDI decided that they didn’t have any work for me, so they stopped paying me. They didn’t send me a notice or call to tell me that they were giving up. They just stopped paying me. I was, as you might expect, upset. I tried to call the Phoenix Account Manager, but he was out of the office as usual. I then tried to contact the main office, but no one seemed interested in talking to me. At that point I wrote a letter. In the letter I accused them of fraud and wrongful termination and I told them that if I did not hear from them by the end of the week I would file a grievance with the state labor board. Because I lived in Arizona, a right-to-work state, there really was no state labor board for me to go to, but this was a California company so I assumed they didn’t know how things worked in Arizona.

I faxed the letter to their head office and waited. At this point I was prepared to hear the worst, or nothing at all. Within a half hour my phone rang. It was a company vice president, and he was just short of apologetic. He made it clear that they couldn’t keep me on forever, and I made it clear that their failure to send me on even a single interview didn’t represent much of a commitment on their part. By the end of the call he had agreed to pay me for the past three weeks and for one more month. He also promised to make a genuine effort to find me more work. They sent me my back pay by overnight mail.

Getting back in the game

I still hoped that TDI would find me another gig, but at this point I was no longer counting on it. I needed work. I was still up to my armpits in debt and I couldn’t afford even a few weeks without pay. I posted my resume on Dice and Monster and mailed it to all of the Tucson and Phoenix technical employment agencies I could find. Three more weeks passed without much movement, but in the final week before my last paycheck, interest picked up. TDI, the company that still employed me, managed to land me a job interview in Dallas. Meanwhile, my resume had generated two more interviews, both in Phoenix. I was about to experience three very different interviews, and get two offers…

Further reading

• EmployeeIssues.com is a great site for researching your rights and the ways to defend them
• Time Management for the Unemployed: When you need work, you need to pay attention to time management

Questions

• Have you ever had a dispute with an employer about pay? How did you handle it?
• Do you have any tips about the best use of employment downtime?

End games concludes the first part of my series on a career in technical writing. The journey so far has taken us from my beginning as an outsider looking for his first job in the career through to the end of my first contract assignment. This seems like a good point to ask, “How am I doing?”

• Do you still like the structure (bullet points, article. further reading, questions)? Are they making the articles too long or do they add to the value? Would you rather just hear the tale?
• Were you expecting something different? Some people may have expected a “how-to” approach. This is more of a tour of a  writing career. I am hoping people find it helpful.
• What do you want to read more of or see less of?

A Career in Technical Writing Series (so far)

• A Career in Technical Writing: Life as a wannabee
• A Career in Technical Writing: Two dates to the prom
• A Career in Technical Writing: The fax about outsourcing
• A Career in Technical Writing: A strange new world
• A Career in Technical Writing: Life as a newbie
• A Career in Technical Writing: Workaround
• A Career in Technical Writing: Last Contractor Standing
• A Career in Technical Writing: Reversals
• A Career in Technical Writing: End games

Bullet Points

• Sometimes all your work can be erased by a business decision
• Companies will never pay technical writers as well as programmers
• Take pride in your work, even if it never quite comes out the way you want it to
• On your last day, shake everyone’s hand and smile

The final push

As my year contract at PHPS edged towards its conclusion, I felt as if I was working at an entirely different company than the one I had started with. The contractors I had begun my job with were long gone. The manager I had started with, and the one that followed him, were gone as well. The company had worked its way through a merger just a few months after I arrived, had then attempted a second merger which fell through, and finally was bought wholesale by a much larger company. As my stay concluded, and I delivered my final manuals, I found out that the entire reporting system that I had spent the year documenting was to be replaced with the new company’s system. Within three months, nothing I worked on would be in use.

This didn’t stop me from making my pitch for a full-time job. I had successfully met all of my deliverables and I was perfectly capable of documenting whatever took its place. My final manager strung me along until the last week. He had me research the going pay rates to justify my salary request ($40,000 a year), give him my resume and write up some additional documentation of their payment processes. I did everything he asked, but I don’t think I ever really expected him to give me a job. He didn’t. He said that they couldn’t afford me.

I was angry. I was angry because I had made it clear over a month earlier that if they couldn’t afford me, I wanted to know quickly so I could look at other options. He had told me it wasn’t an issue as long as I could prove my salary request was well within industry standards, which I had done. I didn’t confront him though. I shook his hand and thanked him for trying. There were still a lot of people I liked at the company, and I didn’t want to burn my bridges.

Lunching and number crunching

It wasn’t until my going-away lunch with my friend Rick, one of the programmers, that I found out how doomed my salary request was. I told him that I had asked for $40,000. He shook his head. “I’m a programmer and I only make $35,000.” It was sad but true. The high-dollar contractors had been replaced by a guy happy to make $35,000 a year, at least $20,000 less than the least experienced contract programmer had made. As a parting gift, I told him that Lynn, the ex-lead programmer, was now making six-figures and working from home. Rick left PHPS within two months to become a well-paid contractor. I’d like to say the company learned a lesson, but by then they were looking to get rid of the SpeedWare programmers anyway.

My final day at PHPS was quiet and pleasant. I had completed all of my assignments, and spent most of the day saying goodbye to people and cleaning out my cubicle. I had hoped to stay, but in the end I was happy to be leaving. I had met my goals and I had learned a lot. I had proven to myself that I could make a living as a technical writer. Also, I was still employed by my contract agency, even though they had yet to find me another job. I was about to experience beach time…

Further Reading

How to Leave a Job on Good Terms by by Jason W: Tips for leaving the workplace with your relationships intact.

Rules of Consulting by Chad Myers: Don’t expect the customer to be rational. If the customer didn’t have problems, they wouldn’t have needed to hire you.

Discussion Questions

• What is the most involved project you’ve ever completed?
• Have you ever been shocked to find out how little a co-worker makes?
• What was your most interesting final day at a company?

Bullet Points

• Adjusting to corporate life can be difficult, especially if you have a tendency to curse
• A cubicle is a terrible place to receive a lecture
• The best way through a work crisis is to do your job well
• The one constant when it comes to managers is change

A visit from Ted

It was at about the tenth month when my mouth got me in trouble. I had said the wrong word about the wrong person at the wrong meeting. This brought a visit from my supervisor Ted, a falsely optimistic alpha-male who had threatened to fire me the first time we ever met. I had no idea trouble was coming when he stopped by my cube, but I naturally dreaded seeing him anyway. No one had said anything to me at the meeting. It had been a quick comment in a larger conversation. Days had passed between the meeting and my manager showing up. He worked out of Phoenix and only came to in Tucson about once a week.

Ted chose to dress me down about the issue in my cube. He wasn’t shouting, but he wasn’t whispering either. More than once the word anal lit up the air around my cube as the people who worked next to me got to hear him tell me that I had been inappropriate and disrespectful. I apologized to him and tried to explain that I hadn’t meant any harm. All through the conversation I had the sinking feeling that I was going to be fired, but the words never came. After about a half hour he ran out of steam and left my cube with a vague threat about my not having a future with the company.

I felt terrible. There was always company gossip before a meeting, and I had fallen into it. I had gotten comfortable with the people around me and I hadn’t watched my language or my attitude. I had no one to blame but myself. I probably should have apologized to my co-worker and I regret not doing so, but I just wanted the whole thing to go away so I jumped back into my work.

Working my way back

I stopped going to the meetings and I holed up in my cube. When I’d started with the company, there had been 160 report programs to document, but as the year had passed the number grew steadily until it had reached around 220. With two months to go, I still had about 80 programs left to document. The good news was that I had found my rhythm by that point. The programs all shared the same interface and many shared steps and variables. The last 80 were a lot of work, but far easier than the first 140 or so. I was documenting about three programs a day at that point, all with screenshots, descriptions and step-through instructions.

After the lecture from Ted, I gave up, for the most part, on a permanent position. I just wanted to get the last of the programs out and move on to a new gig. Just when I had written PHPS off though, Ted ceased to be a problem. One day I simply got an email from the IT manager telling me that Ted had left the company. It was a glowing letter about how much they would miss him and how important he had been to the company.

I couldn’t wipe the smile off of my face the whole day. Ted had finally found a way to put a bounce in my step. The question was, was it too late for me to wrangle a permanent job?

Further reading

Understanding Conflict in the Workplace by Julie Gatlin, Allen Wysocki, and Karl Kepne: A discussion of the eight causes of conflict in the workplace.

Get Off Your Butt: 16 Ways to Get Motivated When You’re in a Slump by Leo Babauta: A great guide to finding your way back when your enthusiasm is lagging.

Discussion questions

• What is the worst mistake you ever made at a job?
• How did you go about correcting that mistake? Could you?
• What are some of the unwritten rules in your workplace?

Bullet Points

• Many people turn contract positions into full-time opportunities
• Contractors are often treated much differently than employees
• Corporate environments continually change and evolve
• Mergers usually create radical changes within a company
• When the going gets tough, the people with options leave
• A good technical writer knows to choose words carefully

The good times

Despite the problems with organization and equipment, PHPS was actually a pretty pleasant place to work for most of my stay. The flat management structure didn’t provide much direction, but it also allowed me a certain degree of freedom to experiment and learn. I had quite a few friends at PHPS too. Most of the contractors came from the same agency and worked in the same area as I did, so we often went to lunch together. I had also made some friends among the regular employees, and some of us took Tai Chi classes together after work. I was putting out user manuals at a steady pace and the reaction was mostly positive. More than once, people at the company asked if I would be interested in coming on permanently.At one point it seemed almost certain that I would be hired after my year contract was up.

Merged and managed

Things began to change at about the eight month mark. PHPS had decided to merge with another company in Phoenix. The Phoenix company was larger, and was going to be setting most of the new rules, even though they would be keeping the PHPS name because PHPS was more highly regarded. As the merger progressed, the first thing to go was the flat management structure.

The new version of the company divided out the development group and added new team lead and a new manager. The team lead (for both programmers and business analysts) was a really nice guy with some good ideas and solid leadership skills. He fit in well with the team and helped to solve day-to-day issues. The new manager wasn’t so great. It was clear (at least to us) that his loyalties were to the company first, the Phoenix team second, the Tucson team third and the contractors dead last. Rather than have team meetings as a whole group, he held separate meetings with the regular staff and the contractors. The meetings with the contractors were chilly. In the very first meeting, when the lead programmer (who was a contractor) brought up a couple technical issues, the manager stated flat-out that any contractor who didn’t like the situation should leave.

Exodus

The problem with telling this to the lead programmer was that he was by far the best programmer they had. You don’t make a contractor your lead programmer unless he is really, really good. There were six programmers at that point — three contract programmers and three regular employees. On a six man team Lynn, was easily responsible for half the output. He was that good and that fast. He was also in demand.

Lynn wasn’t happy. His problem (until then) hadn’t been with PHPS, it had been with the consulting agency that employed us. Much like PHPS, the agency was going through a merger and conditions were changing. We went from being paid every two weeks to getting paid twice a month. We still had to bill weekly though, which made for some odd-looking hours sheets that made the managers nervous. We also went from having the VP at the agency fly in once a month and treat us to dinner to reporting to an unseen guy out of Phoenix who rarely returned calls. Lynn didn’t need to put up with those problems. Twenty minutes after that first meeting Lynn was on the phone, and two weeks later he was working out of his home for $12,000 more a year. PHPS, finally realizing they were losing a valuable person, offered to match the money and bring him on permanently but by then it was too late. He wanted out. The other two contractors didn’t stick around long either. Within a month, I was the last contractor standing.

A hitch in my get-along

Once the other contractors had left, the company saw no reason to keep me with the development team, even though almost all of my work was with them. Instead, they moved me to the help desk team. I didn’t man the help desk, but I reported to their manager. My first meeting with the help desk manager (a one-on-one lunch) went about as well as the first meeting with the development manager. I discussed some of the obstacles I was facing (equipment problems, a lack of feedback/direction) and I was told that if I didn’t think I could do the job, I should leave. I backed off and stopped raising issues. Unlike Lynn, I didn’t have a dozen other companies trying to lure me away and I actually wanted to be a permanent employee. He told me if I wanted to stay I needed to put “a bounce in my step” and “fly with the eagles.”

I knew I was in trouble. At 300 pounds, I didn’t bounce and I didn’t fly. Things bounced or flew off me. I did what I could though. I removed the six-foot cardboard cutout of the Starship Voyager from my cube and began wearing slacks, long-sleeved shirts and ties to work on the days he came down from Phoenix (even though the company only required polo shirts and khakis). I walked faster. I faked a positive and outgoing personality as best I could. I adopted a name for this persona, “Dynamic John”. He was the guy with the enthusiastic can-do attitude. I could keep it up for about six hours, which was usually enough. This technique worked for a while because I only had to see the guy once a week. The rest of the week I could be my normal self and get work done.

A poor choice of words

Because I still worked with the development team, I still attended the development team meetings. The other contractors were gone, but the rest of the team remained intact and they had hired one new full-timer to replace the contractors they lost. As we were waiting for the meeting to start, someone mentioned that Shelly, one of the trainers, was being promoted training supervisor. I said that would be terrific because she was so organized, except I didn’t say “organized”. I said “anal”, as in “anal retentive”. It was a quick thoughtless statement in a longer conversation and nobody reacted badly at the time. I didn’t realize I had done something wrong until my new manager came by to see me the next day…

Further reading

• Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister: A book about right way to create high performing creative and technical teams.
• The Key to a Successful Merger of Cultures? Look at Employee Demographics by Alice LaPlante: An argument in favor of getting rid of people who resist a merger.

Discussion Questions

• What experiences have you had with corporate mergers?
• What do you think makes a good manager?
• Do you change your personality when you go to work?

Bullet Points

• A workaround is a procedure designed to overcome a shortcoming of a program or piece of equipment.
• Sometimes the tools dictate the format of your work
• Projects tend to go better if you have a plan (believe it or not)
• Take the time to talk to the people on your project

Beating the system

Workarounds are common in the world of technical writing. They are the clever little solutions that you come up with because the program won’t do what you need it to do (hack is another term for this). In many cases, a workaround is needed because the program has a flaw. It is supposed to work a certain way, but it doesn’t. In other cases a workaround is needed because you want to make a program do something it was never designed to do. Workarounds aren’t just for hardware and software, they are for any situation in which you need to circumvent the established system. Workarounds are useful, and sometimes necessary, but they are never as good as a system that does what you need properly, and they are rarely supported.

After the success of the programmer’s reference, I wanted to put out a user’s guide. Of course, many of the problems that plagued my first attempt still had not gone away. I had no one telling me exactly what they wanted, and I still wasn’t sure what each report did or who it did it for. What I did have was the ability to take screenshots (images of the computer screen) and walk people through the process of filling out the pages needed to run the reports. I also had the information about what the output of the reports would be. By working with the main program (The main program was AMISYS and the report programs were custom written using SpeedWare) I started tracking down the variables as they corresponded to the report requests. This gave me some idea of what a user would enter.

Talking to people would have helped

Had I been more inclined to seek out the requesters and interview them, I surely would have come up with better information, but I was an introvert (according to my Myers-Briggs personality test I am INFP). The idea of tracking down strange people for information gave me an uneasy feeling with roots going all the way back to my daily beat-downs from schoolyard bullies as a kid (which thankfully ended when I grew to 6-1, 200 pounds by my freshman year in high school). My early days had taught me not to view strangers as friends, so I generally didn’t like to meet new people.

No one ever came along to ask how the project was going. Very few people, it seemed, had any understanding of what I was doing. The only people who showed any interest in my at all were the contract programmers. They would at least look at what I had written and offer advice, but none of them had a real stake in the outcome of my project. They were dealing with their own issues. Issues that I would soon get caught up in.

A simple plan

In the end, I came up with a simple format for the help. I documented each report with the following information (or as much of it as I had):

• Name of the program
• File name for the program
• Short (one sentence) description of the program
• Screen shot of the first screen
• Long description of the program (about a paragraph)
• Step-by-step process of filling out the fields
• Additional screen shots as needed for the process
• Description of the output

I’ve learned a few things over the years, and I’m sure I could come up with a better plan today, but at that point I was just happy to have a plan at all. This was a system that could have worked in Microsoft Word, although it would have been ugly. Microsoft Word does funny things when you add graphics. It tends to lose or move them, and it slows down dramatically. I had been pushing the company buy me FrameMaker for months (by this point I had grown to believe it could fix any problem), but the new FrameMaker required Windows 95 or Windows NT. The company eventually made the upgrade, and gave me my software, but by then I had a whole new set of problems to deal with. The work environment was about to change dramatically as I faced twin mergers, a new platitude-spouting manager and a programmer who hated my guts. Plus, I was about to say the word anal in front of the wrong crowd.

Further reading

• The 16 Personality Types by Linda V. Berens and Dario Nardi: A lot of people have made a lot of money telling people who they are.
• Make Your Own Pocket Duct Tape Dispenser by Brad Isaac: An excellent example of a workaround.
• How to Take a Screenshot in Microsoft Windows by wikiHOW: It’s actually pretty easy

Discussion questions

• What parts of your personality get in the way of your success?
• What are your tips for planning a project?
• Do you have a favorite workaround?

Bullet points

• Struggling to make the wrong tool work for a job can add months to a project
• FrameMaker is good for long technical documents
• PageMaker is good for sending a newsletter to your Aunt Fanny
• Sometimes the most important thing a technical writer can do is gather information
• When expectations are sufficiently low, it’s easy to be a star

Meet your Maker

I wish I could say I got off to a running start and quickly proved my value at my new job, but this is about my real career, not my resume. Life at PHPS did not begin with a bang. No one really knew what they wanted me to do, and my equipment wasn’t exactly state-of-the-art. I was hoping for FrameMaker, but I got PageMaker instead. The two products sound similar, but there is the world of difference between them. PageMaker wasn’t designed for long documents or technical material; it was designed for creating newsletters and flyers. I knew the product pretty well from my days working as an editor for a small newspaper, and I knew it wasn’t going to do anything I needed it to do. That didn’t stop me from trying. I designed a few pages of how-to materials, but the process was slow and tedious. Before I knew it, three months had passed and I really hadn’t produced much of anything. It was at that point that I decided to change course.

That report has a lot of fans

I had spent a lot of those first three months reading code and looking at output. Both the code and the output came on long bands of fanfold paper. You don’t see it as much anymore, but back then most reports were printed on page after page of green and white paper held together (and in order) by perforated edges. For some reports the code ran only half a dozen pages or so, but others ran much longer. As for output, that could go on for hundreds of pages, but I rarely needed to see much beyond the first and the last page. Those were the ones with the column headers and the totals.

Sometimes your audience is just a cube away

After three months of banging my head against a monitor trying to develop something for the end users, I gave up on that and decided to create a reference manual for the programmers. I wasn’t sure if it would be useful, but there was no one to tell me not to do it, so I just switched gears and started putting something together.

The reference manual was far from pretty. I created it using Microsoft Word, which could handle text just fine, even if it fell short on the artistic end. I went through the code for each program and documented the one thing I was sure the programmers would care about — the variables. Every program had a list of variable names somewhere in it, which it used to call up information from the database. In addition, the program code listed the header information and the column names for the output, so I documented those items too. I also had (from the interface) a list of what programs were used by which departments, so I recorded that. If I had any other information, such as someone’s description of the report, I plugged that in too. All of these items together started to look useful, so I showed it to the programmers.

Believe it or not, I’m on top of the world

The programmers were ecstatic. They loved it. Without knowing it, I had created exactly what they were looking for. They could now look over the reference and figure out if an old program could be turned into a new one because it shared enough key information. This would really speed up the programming process, they told me. I was a hit, but I felt a little guilty. Creating this really wasn’t that hard and I didn’t do any real writing. All I did was gather information. If I had known that this was what they needed, I could have given it to them three months earlier. I didn’t say this, of course. I just went back to my cube and tried to figure out what to do for the end users…

Further reading

Quick Reference Guides: The Poetry of Technical Writing by Tom Johnson: An excellent guide to condensing a manual down to a two-sided piece of laminated paper.

How to Get a Lot Done – 7 Tips to Achieve More by Collis Ta’eed: Planning, teaming, delegating… give it a try.

Discussion questions

• How do you set goals for an unfamiliar project?
• When a strategy isn’t working, how do you know when to scrap it?
• How do you handle praise?