So work went well yesterday. I stepped up to the plate and hit some nice little base hits (figuratively speaking) and I took the opportunity to explain some of my insecurities to my new boss in a way that let him know my top concern is for the health of the company, not just being a whiney little girl. Basically, with the old boss we had someone who could be there if the server went down or if there were some other kind of major technical emergency. I let him know that although I am in school to learn that stuff, I've only taken general education classes thus far and I don't have the experience or education for server maintenance. I let him know that I am willing and even eager to learn how to manage the server but that it wasn't the kind of place where you put a novice and tell them to figure it out like I do with most other things because the server is the beating heart of the company and we needed to make sure we had a heart surgeon on call just in case. He seemed to understand and appreciate my position and is going to try to mend fences with our old programmer (fences the previous owner burned) so that we can have that emergency contact that we need. The new boss is a business guy, not a technology guy, so as it turns out he wasn't necessarily expecting me to know everything, he just didn't understand the various levels involved in running a tech company. I feel a lot better now - I feel like there is a huge potential for growth in the company (and in my position here) again, pending my education and I feel like I actually have an employer who supports my education goals whereas before it felt like the other guy was threatened by them. I am willing to dig in and do anything that I can for this company right now but I don't want to be the one who messes it up. It's a delicate situation right now. Clearly, I also need to speak with my educational counselor about including some server classes in my BS if possible.
In other news, the sunburn is still raging and it affected my sleep last night. I kicked the dog out of the bed weeks ago but she has her basket right next to the bed and she gets restless in the middle of the night and just spins circles in it. I wanted to lock her and the cat up last night but Snackers wouldn't let me. Tonight I'm going to put my foot down. I can't keep sleeping like this. It's no wonder I feel like I don't have energy to exercise even though I ate well yesterday, sleep is so vitally important!
p.s. this might be TMI but I've experienced a miracle. So I woke up at 4:30 am to pee, then went again when I woke up at 6:00, again about 6:45, again around 7:20, again at 8:00 right before Snackers left for work. Then again at 9:00 and again at 10:20 and again at 11:00. No joke ... it's 12:36 in the afternoon and I've peed 8 times already. Even more amazing? I've only drank ONE glass of water and ONE cup of coffee. So where is it all coming from right?! Well I weighed when I woke up at 6:00 and was still 245 right on the nose. Weighed again after the last potty break because I thought 'I haven't drank this much liquid today. This has gotta be coming from somewhere' and sure as shit ... 233.5. HOLY MACKEREL! Let this be a lesson ... sun burn + wine + dehydration = water retention!
Food:
7 glasses of water
1 cup of coffee w/creamer
1 serving greek chicken salad
1 chicken cordon bleu (food bible)
>>no ham, no honey mustard
1/4 cup rice mix
-----------------------------------------
Daily Caloric Intake: 987
Isn't it great to know that we have come so far that a glitch doesn't throw us completely and we do some real damage? The blogging support group plays such an important part. I am glad you found it within you to talk to your new boss instead of holding it in or causing some problems with the server. Way to go.
ReplyDeleteA quick note... the guy you want managing your servers should *not* be a "programmer". If he even calls himself a "programmer", you should be concerned.
ReplyDelete"Programmers" usually shy away from that label and prefer "software developer" b/c most modern programming is more than just writing a quick little script that does a single task. And software developers aren't trained, per-se, in managing a complex server -- their training is geared more towards writing/maintaining... ... SOFTWARE programs.
The guy you want maintaining your server would call himself an "IT" or perhaps a "network admin", something along those lines -- but not a programmer. IT's deal much more with hardware and small scripts (which, yes, is programming) but their specialty isn't programming per-se.
Anyways I only say that because you've always referred to this guy as a "programmer"... and in LV it's possible he is having a hard time finding a job so he's willing to do IT-work even though he's actually a software developer. But that's really not the ideal choice -- his degree should be in Computer Science but many degrees will have a "specialty" listed... for example, mine says "software engineering", IT-types I know who graduated alongside me have degrees that list their specialty as "information systems".
You want a guy whose specialty (whether listed on his degree or not; if not, his coursework on his transcript would be heavily-based on systems-courses not software-courses) is IT.
Granted, your current guy knows your system and has experience; that's good too. But being a small company like you guys, you don't have anything to compare to. For all you know, he's put bad practices into place on your system and/or it takes him 5x as long to do something a properly-trained IT guy could've accomplished with much less time(money).
I have a guy right now looking at maybe stealing me away from my current job... he has a ton of mixed-work ranging from website-development to IT-stuff. I'm telling him upfront that I can help with his IT-stuff in the short-term but ideally we would grow his computer-dept by having me only do the software stuff and hiring an IT guy to manage the system.
It's worth your time/effort to make sure this guy is actually an IT-type; if he's not, you'd do your company a favor to seek out an IT-type for hire. Honestly, in the LV-environment, there must be a million of them hungry for a job. If you can't afford/need a FT-hire, there are companies that specifically sub-contract this sort of thing as well.
I'm honestly not sure what Jeff refers to himself as but the label "programmer" has just always come from my inexperienced association. I do know that he built the entire vLender system and has done our development and server maintenance for over 10 years until early last year when he was put on an "on-call" basis but then they just stopped calling him. They brought in this other guy who was cheaper but every time he TOUCHED the server he broke something and then wouldn't know how to fix it. He was probably a programmer by your description above who tried to dabble in server work and failed miserably. I'm really pushing the new boss to bring Jeff back because I honestly doubt a new guy would know our system with the intimacy and proficiency that Jeff does. Jeff is my hero - second only to you of course. :)
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