I have made my living as a -
what do you call it? - computer programmer, software
engineer, systems analyst - from 1987 to 2017.
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Here I am, an IRS employee,
getting an award in 1987.
At left is the Director of the Kansas City Service Center,
and at right is the Commissioner for the Midwest Region.
This award is for a computerized worksheet package I
created on my own time at home,
which was accepted for nationwide use in the Underreporter
Program.
The amount of the award was the largest ever
given by the IRS for an employee suggestion.
Say what you want about the government,
but I observed that it's a better-managed organization
than most private employers,
its employees are for the most part dedicated and
conscientious, and a talented and hard-working person can
do well.
This was the last big thing I did at the IRS. I regret
resigning.
Here is an article about software I created for the
Criminal Investigation Branch at the Kansas City Service
Center in the early 1990s.
The program I created went into use in all ten service
centers, and again, I received a sizeable award for my
work.
Some observations on my career, and the state of
the workaday world in general.
My career did not get easier. Oh, the work
itself didn't change a great deal; it was still a matter of
figuring out how to make a machine do what you want it to, and
then doing it. The capabilities of the machines have
grown, and the languages one uses to communicate with the
machine have evolved, so it is challenging to stay abreast of
technological advancements.
But that's not the hardest thing. The hardest thing is finding
a good job and keeping it. With a few exceptions, like
government work (and even that's increasingly going to
contracting), permanent jobs are rare in the field.
Management seems to have decided that IT people are a
commodity, to be replaced like tires on a car.
It makes sense to use contractors for projects which have a
beginning and an end, but I don't understand paying a
contractor a large wage for work which is needed for the
foreseeable future. The company is really paying another
company, which then pays the contractor. If the
contractor makes $45/hour, the cost to the company is more
like $80/hour. Doesn't the company realize that letting
someone go means a loss of knowledge and competence, and that
it's more cost-effective in the long run to hire someone as a
direct employee who will be there for years?
Best example: I worked at Monsanto on contract for five years,
doing significant things and gaining a lot of knowledge about
the business and its procedures. After about 4-1/2
years, it became obvious that the people in the boardroom
planned to "cut costs" by getting rid of us American
contractors and bringing in lower-cost contractors from India,
and we were expected to train our replacements. I
suspect this decision was related to Monsanto's desire to sell
itself to Bayer AG. I mean no disrespect to foreigners, but I
found that many of these new contractors could not speak
English and had very little concept of how to do the
work. I wonder how that worked out after I left...
Since I was laid off from Cellnet in 2004 (again, cost-cutting
in preparation for acquisition by another company), I have had
done work for:
Yellow Roadway, Overland Park
AMC Entertainment, Kansas City
State of Tennessee, Nashville
"Permanent" job with Materialogic, Olivette, MO
BJC Healthcare, Brentwood, MO, rewriting old server code
Wells Fargo Advisors, St. Louis
Magellan Health Services, St. Louis Country
Commonwealth of Virginia, remote from Chesterfield, MO,
creating procedures to load Medicaid claims into a data
warehouse
Monsanto, Creve Coeur, MO, applications DBA
Enterprise Holdings (car-rental company), Weldon
Springs, MO
In 2017, I went from Enterprise to Charter
Communications (now Spectrum) in northwest St. Louis
County. After three months, I was offered a
*permanent* position with Charter, good pay and
benefits. My second day in that permanent position, my
mother died in an automobile accident. She had named
me as executor of her estate, which was
comfortably-but-not-extremely sizable. I went to a
meeting at work the next day where silly stuff was being
contemplated, and I had an epiphany: I don't have to
do this anymore. So ... I retired! Thanks, Mom!
In the early
2000s, I noticed that job postings in my field were
increasingly requiring a Bachelor's degree.
Seeing the writing on the wall, I got the degree that I
had started on at the University of Kansas in 1968.
In fact, this website was my "Capstone Project."
Copyright 2006, 2013, 2022 by
Andy Curry