New Job, At Long Last

Slowhand · May 2017

So I've been in the IT industry for over a decade, but the last few years have been spent as a contractor in various places. The last job I held was a contracting gig that lasted for over 2 and 1/2 years, where I was acting senior staff and my day-to-day tasks basically became that of a regular employee. For the final 16 months, though, I worked under a horrible manager who was neither particularly competent nor particularly nice. He was more interested in making sure his employees did what he said than in getting results and getting the most out of the talent he had under him. He went through the motions of having me interview for FTE, offering me about $30,000 less per year than I was asking for, then lied about "the others" not wanting to hire me, (every other manager and senior admin who'd been on the conference call to interview me would ask when they were planning on bringing me on board. In the end, we never did get along, so he eventually laid me off last October under the pretense that there wasn't enough money in the budget, my counterpart senior admin left the company two months later, leaving the manager holding the bag of Active Directory with a staff primarily comprised of former offshore helpdesk techs that knew enough about Windows Server to not completely break things if given access. This goes well with the manager's outlook that automation is dangerous and unstable, favoring doing all tasks being done by hand by the junior-level admins.

Fast forward to last week: Active Directory is being moved from the old Windows Ops department into Platform-as-a-Service and Identity Management, effectively being taken away from the other manager under much protest from him; (his team wasn't able to complete any major AD-related projects in the past six months, so the decision was made by higher-ups that a change was needed.) Last Monday, I started my new full-time position in Identity Management as Active Directory engineer for this same company. My first order of business has been to call meetings with my former team, (and former manager,) to oversee the transfer of all Active Directory permissions and functions to my new team. Same job, same basic responsibilities, new manager. We're also beginning the process of moving AD functionality into both AWS and Azure for supporting company applications, as well as providing the flexibility we need to move in a distinctly more DevOps direction with the infrastructure since my new manager is highly in favor of scripting, automation, and developing self-sufficient processes within AD to self-heal common issues, fix known problems, etc.

All in all, life is pretty good. Finally an FTE for the first time since 2009, got to smack my old boss around, and I'm going to fast-track into a full-fledged DevOps/Cloud admin before long.