What's the worst working enviroment you've worked in? (IT related jobs)

alexander77

I'm just curious about some of the enviroments out there that you guys have worked in.. My current gig has to be my worst IT related job due to the lack of organization with management and poor communication between team members. There isn't even an imaging software for machines!! It's pretty much just install Windows and manually add the other applications such as office and Java. When suggesting maybe having SCCM or something it falls on deaf ears..

Needless to say I am looking to leave when I find the right opportunity.

CodeBlox

My contracting gig at NMCI has to be the worst for me. It was on their 24/7 callcenter helldesk. Nonstop calls for a mandatory 10 hour shift really sucks.

slotzero

I took a job a couple years ago that turned out to be not that great. I was the newest hire in a team of 7 - 6 devs and 1 manager.

Before I even interviewed, I talked to a couple of contacts I had in the company whom I'd worked with before. They both gave me glowing reviews of the company. What I didn't know at that point was that they worked for the parent company, and I was interviewing for a position in a subsidiary service company that resided in the same building. The service company is regarded as the "red-headed stepchild" so to speak, and even my contacts with the parent company didn't speak to me after I hired into the service side.

Turned out to be a huge case of bait and switch. They even refused to honor the conditions that were in the job offer I had signed after I started. I'm pretty sure what they did was illegal, but by that point I already knew I wouldn't be there long enough for it to matter.

My new manager talked a good game at the start, but turned out he had little experience in IT, and no management experience. No idea how to allocate resources. I would literally get told to switch working on projects 5-6 times in a single day. It was impossible to accomplish anything without staying late every night. I had to stay after my boss so I could at least get *something* done to deliver to our customers.

I worked off of specs and requirements that he had gathered. Not one single project had requirements that actually met the needs of the business. Unfortunately I did not discover that until late in my very short tenure.

Additionally the outright abuse between co-workers and departments was like nothing I'd ever seen. On several occaisions I watched people yelling and screaming at each other. One older guy came into the vault (the area where we worked) and was red-faced screaming at my co-worker because he missed a meeting. I thought it was actually going to get physical. Completely inappropriate.

I was there just shy of 4 months. Weeks before I quit, 2 of the other devs gave their notice and left. After I left, one dev went on vaca and didn't return. The rest quit within the next few weeks.

Oh, and our office space was dreadful. They converted an old vault in the basement into office space. It was poorly lit, extremely loud, smelled musty. I was the only one with a window view... to the spigot in the parking lot. It was so loud I had to wear earplugs most of the day or my ears would ring at night so badly I couldn't sleep.



On the bright side, that manager scored an interview at my current company. Since I get to participate in most of the interviews, he got to interview with me. That was fun.

Glad I'm not there any longer. Sheesh.

Plantwiz

Just going to toss this out there...


Keep in mind, many businesses (companies) start as a person's dream (or perhaps a small team of people). The beginning sometimes has a business plan and many times there is no business plan. The person works their butt off and finally reaches a point where it makes sense to bring on another person or two. They all bust out work, but not any one person is an expert on proper business management...because they are 'good' at what they do, or make, or whatever.

One thing leads to another and viola, something that looks like a 'real' business. Phones, a few departments, mix-match of people, maybe, just maybe an HR department. The business may even have lasted past a single generation and now is shifting gears a bit. One common factor I have witness over the decades is that somewhere over the years the business is not exactly what the originator planned, but took on a life of its own. Additionally, each step along the way, people were hired. People who 'promised' to do their best and make the company better. Yet I have seen, I have read, and I have worked with people who, rather than make a difference, sit back and point out all the flaws within and around the organization. Be it the structure, or the people, the new 'guy/gal' all of a sudden finds that 'this' business doesn't match up to the utopia that was presented in his/her high school or college business class.

Financial stewardship is unfortunately not a strong suit for many people I have met. That translates that they maybe didn't elect the best capital improvements over the years...and it may translate that they hired people to work, who they maybe should not have hired. It may mean, there were a few wolves in the mix, so $50-100K or more of wages were paid out to people who did not generate money back for that initial guys dream.

Bottom line, any time one can do it better...GO FOR IT!

The reality is that to successfully run a company, one must wear many hats. Additionally, until they hire the right people to ride their bus (read Steven Coveny "Good to Great") the ball is rolling and sometimes things work well, and other times there is collateral damages.

Be part of the solution.

tprice5

slotzero wrote: »

On the bright side, that manager scored an interview at my current company. Since I get to participate in most of the interviews, he got to interview with me. That was fun.

More on this please!

That place looks and sounds dreadful. I am surprised you made it 4 months.

+1 for pity & bc I want to hear about your smug smile while you interviewed him.

pbchief2

I spent a month being a gopher for the IT fix it lab at Qualcomm. It was interesting, but being the low man after years of being the top guy in another profession made me dislike a few people that lacked soft skills.

BGraves

Um...so don't take this as me complaining...just stating facts.

3 year tour on the USS Essex in Sasebo, Japan.
Underway 8 months of every year
IT Help Desk/Network/System Admin along with managing junior personnel.
Work 7 days a week when underway, 12 hour shifts (more like 14 after turn over and extra duties)
In port, 5 days a week, 10 hour days, unless you were on duty in which case it was all day and all night with a 4 hour watch and then catching two hours of sleep on the floor while backups were running then work the next day too.
*edit, oh I forgot to mention...we had no chairs because our leadership believed that chairs made it look like we were being lazy, so we stood the entire shift if we weren't out walking on a troublecall, etc.

Primary customers, superior ranking enlisted and officers and...marines.

After that, every other job has seemed...pretty great! =D

slotzero

tprice5 wrote: »

More on this please!

That place looks and sounds dreadful. I am surprised you made it 4 months.

+1 for pity & bc I want to hear about your smug smile while you interviewed him.

LOL thanks - I'm sure many more have or have had it much worse. The look on his face when he saw me in the technical interview was priceless. I was very polite, but coincidentally I think he encountered the roughest technical interview he'd had in a while.

Dieg0M

2 months in Yellowknife, North Territories, Canada with the Canadian Military to support an arctic exercice. Sleeping outside in tents on the floor only 4 hours per day at -45 Celcius (-49 F). During the day I did network administration and engineering in a warm tent. I showered twice during those 2 months and had to defecate outside in bags and urinate in bags also.

Gorby

@Dieg0M;

Sounds like a nightmare..were you contracting for the military or in service?

Dieg0M

In service. Contractors sleep in hotels.

slotzero

@Dieg0M

After that experience, not much would rattle your cage!

BGraves

@Dieg0M

You win!

devils_haircut

Dieg0M wrote: »

In service. Contractors sleep in hotels.

So does everyone E-8 and up if you're in the Indiana National Guard.


Going from active duty to the NG was such a terrible idea.

4_lom

@Dieg0M

^^^ He definitely wins the *shi*ty job prize*

pzero

Sounds like "Character Building"

--chris--

Plantwiz wrote: »

Just going to toss this out there...


Be part of the solution.

Post of the year! Good timing, just beat the cut off

Seriously though. I have lived/cried/bled in a small business and grown (literally & figuratively) with the business. It is my dads business, he started in the late '70s. He grew it from a back room in a strip mall to a whole city block in an industrial city near Detroit. At one point he had ~45 employees and grossed around 20 million/year. He has made the right decision 90% of the time, but that 10%....it can really bite the business. Its coming back to haunt him now. Just about everything P'wiz posted above is accurate. It pretty much tells the story of my dads (and I am sure many others) business.

Like he said, being a part of the solution (no matter how upside down things might be) is the best way to go about it.

slotzero

I fully agree "being part of the solution" is the best approach. You are responsible for your station in life.

I believe it's naive to think that all situations can be fixed. Especially when you're an individual contributor in a business. You just don't have the full picture as an IC, and you shouldn't. You can make things under your direct control better, and you can make suggestions to management, but in the end that's all you can do. When you're in a small company with 50 people, your scope of influence is much larger than if you're an employee in a shop with thousands of employees.

It's smart to realize and be able to know when you've done all you can, and when you need to move on for your own benefit. Sometimes for the company's benefit. There are times when what you believe is "the solution" is totally out of step with where the upper management is going.

In an ideal world, divorce would never happen. The parties involved would be part of the solution and they would fix the marriage. Real world is much more complex, rarely black and white. Same with corporate relationships - rarely are the situations black and white.

My two cents anyway, I've enjoyed the responses on this thread! I hope more folks chime in.

paul78

The concept of "worst IT" environment is relative. I can't think of any place that I would ever call a bad experience. For me, I've never worked someplace that I wasn't prepared to accept the working conditions. I make educated decisions to work in a particular environment and I accept the conditions. Heck, I worked for a small company where we took turns taking out the trash. And because we wanted a shower in the office, we also took turns cleaning the shower. We didn't hire a cleaning company but it saved us a bundle. Although in retrospect, the savings were simply an excuse to spend it on drinks on Fridays.

--chris--

paul78 wrote: »

Heck, I worked for a small company where we took turns taking out the trash.

I am jealous! You guys took turns?!

MSP-IT

paul78 wrote: »

We didn't hire a cleaning company but it saved us a bundle. Although in retrospect, the savings were simply an excuse to spend it on drinks on Fridays.

I was told this at the last job I worked at. They said it saved the company money so that it could be used in bonuses and raises. Little did I know that bonuses required 2+ years of service (bonus on your third year), and the average raise was just under the rate of inflation. Needless to say, I didn't stay very long.

SoergBot

My Current position after only 5 months of Healthcare.

Whether it the ignorance or laziness of employees here or the lack of organization and poor planning from our Department.
Everything seems to wait till last minute with our Director and nothing is documented, so simple problems take a great deal of time.

Nurses calls every 5 minutes with similar problems, and even after user education I still find myself fixing the same issues time and time again.

I think my hardest part is coming from a IT military background where everyone pulled their own weight.

paul78

--chris-- wrote: »

I am jealous! You guys took turns?!

LOL - it was all quite civilized. It is one of my favourite companies that I ever worked at.

I suppose that the point of my post is that "bad environments" are highly dependent on an individual's perception of what is fair and tolerable. I am always skeptical of generalized statements that so-and-so company is either a "bad environment" or a "great environment" from a singular point of view. Even well-informed reports can be wrong - some of the older TE members may remember a company called Enron who at one time was considered by Fortune magazine as one of America's most admired and innovative companies.