How do I explain an 18-month career change I don't think I want to make after all?
July 18, 2012 8:25 AM Subscribe
I changed careers but the company and position haven't worked out and I don't think I've progressed enough to really progress in the field. How do I switch back, and should I?
Mid-year last year I made a pretty big switch in careers, from an editorial role that allowed me to do a little programming now and then to a position as the one and only in-house web developer for a small company. I had what turns out to be an extensive amount of knowledge about system administration compared to a $100+/hour external support team the company had been depending on, but my PHP wasn't great and I don't really enjoy front-end design. I wasn't completely without programming experience: I'd built some internal apps with Rails and Sinatra that weren't completely trivial.
Both my employer and I knew what we were getting into. I was up front that I'd need to do a lot of learning to get up to speed on PHP and the company's platform, and I was told some things that made it seem like a good move:
1. That the company is generally cautious about pushing its stock software, and so requires very little custom code, just maintenance.
2. That the company anticipated growth such that the point of the hire wasn't to bring me in as a full-time developer in perpetuity: I was expected to learn my way around and get used to dealing with the external teams. Within a year, my position was supposed to shift to one of management and coordination of a small team.
This all seemed like a great deal at the time, because I'd worked my way up to a senior management position in my web editorial career and already knew that I had good skills when it came to working with technical teams: It's something I had done plenty in my last job, designing a few projects that required the development team to buy in with some success. Moving back a step into a purely technical role seemed like a good idea, though, because I wanted to get more direct experience in a publicly facing Web application before trying to lead a technical team.
A few things have become clear:
The job has involved very little programming time. We have outside contractors who know our systems well and end up doing most of the custom work we need. I review their code, but my boss has been content to let the relationship sit at one of "the spec goes out, the code comes back," and he insists on drawing up the spec without a lot of input most of the time.
The day-to-day job feels secretarial: Our outside team isn't very disciplined with version control, so I spend a lot of time merging their changes and pushing them through the staging process. My boss is the classic super-intelligent autodidact, which means he's making up a lot as he goes along. Meetings to discuss a new feature or design are more like long, meandering lectures. It takes a major investment to divert him from anything he wants to do in the way he's decided it needs to be done. At this point I'd be willing to attempt even poorly thought out development projects, but as I noted, they just get handed off anyhow. I've asked for more in-depth work, but only had one project where I was allowed to dig in and see things all the way through. It ended successfully -- I delivered more than anyone asked for in the right timeframe -- but when I said I wanted more like it, I was laughed off ("Who doesn't want more time to do what they like?")
Finally, the company's a mess. Recent losses have caused us to drop potentially profitable projects that are 90 percent completed, but poor prioritizing has caused us to spend a lot on projects that are of generally speculative value. I also suspect my boss is characterizing some technical failures dishonestly to his boss, who recently told me he was disappointed I hadn't been willing to support a particular project. I was flabbergasted, because I'd been told specifically to avoid that project outside a few very small contributions the outside team couldn't do on its own.
The paranoid frisson I got from that interaction aside, it's plain that the lack of money is going to keep anyone new from being hired any time soon. After a year of playing code janitor with constant distractions in the form of having to handle end user support and pointy-clicky administration of things like the company email and newsletter systems, I haven't learned much more about web development than I had going in.
My bosses, the CTO and CEO say I'm indispensable to the operation, and that I have a future there, but the whole situation is personally embarrassing: I used to be a pretty damn good editor, content strategist and site architect. Now I'm a hack "developer" in title only who jockeys a CMS around when he's not cleaning up everyone else's version controlled diapers. I'm just not where I wanted to be by now, and the company's money problems -- which the CEO personally called me to brush off in a really weird, rambly, distracted monologue with occasional re-asking me whether I was looking for a different job and reassuring me that things would be turning around soon so I should stay -- are making me nervous. I endured 2000-2002 in dotcoms and survived 80 percent layoffs, but like I said earlier, I felt like I was awesome back then and anyone would have been stupid to lay me off. Now I feel thoroughly disposable and I don't think, were I running my own company, I'd hire myself for my current position.
I'm willing to accept that I haven't made the most of the last year. My whole situation could well be my own fault. At the same time, I think the company isn't a good place for me, there are signs I'm not being dealt with honestly, I don't think the company has a very bright future, and I think it's time to go. I'm unhappy enough that my wife insists it's time to go.
I guess this is a two-fold question:
1. I took a modest pay cut to get this job, and was told (not promised, just told) that once the company picked up the internal development staff I'd be managing that I'd be getting a raise along with my promotion. I can't afford to slip any further in pay, but I don't feel any more marketable than I did a year ago. In some ways, I've learned enough to ruin most of the confidence I had coming in and I feel less marketable. What are my chances that I'm going to see north of $70,000 a year in a non-senior-level web developer position should I choose to go out and find one in an attempt to get back on the rails? I have so little faith in the company's judgment that I feel grossly overpaid for how little I know. If that sounds like a completely unreasonable salary, I need to hear that.
2. If there's no salvaging my career change (where salvage involves not going down any further in pay or self esteem), how do I frame this one-year stint? How do recruiters and HR people see this sort of change? What kinds of questions should I anticipate, what kinds of negative perceptions might I be dealing with, and how should I craft my résumé to deal with them?
Mid-year last year I made a pretty big switch in careers, from an editorial role that allowed me to do a little programming now and then to a position as the one and only in-house web developer for a small company. I had what turns out to be an extensive amount of knowledge about system administration compared to a $100+/hour external support team the company had been depending on, but my PHP wasn't great and I don't really enjoy front-end design. I wasn't completely without programming experience: I'd built some internal apps with Rails and Sinatra that weren't completely trivial.
Both my employer and I knew what we were getting into. I was up front that I'd need to do a lot of learning to get up to speed on PHP and the company's platform, and I was told some things that made it seem like a good move:
1. That the company is generally cautious about pushing its stock software, and so requires very little custom code, just maintenance.
2. That the company anticipated growth such that the point of the hire wasn't to bring me in as a full-time developer in perpetuity: I was expected to learn my way around and get used to dealing with the external teams. Within a year, my position was supposed to shift to one of management and coordination of a small team.
This all seemed like a great deal at the time, because I'd worked my way up to a senior management position in my web editorial career and already knew that I had good skills when it came to working with technical teams: It's something I had done plenty in my last job, designing a few projects that required the development team to buy in with some success. Moving back a step into a purely technical role seemed like a good idea, though, because I wanted to get more direct experience in a publicly facing Web application before trying to lead a technical team.
A few things have become clear:
The job has involved very little programming time. We have outside contractors who know our systems well and end up doing most of the custom work we need. I review their code, but my boss has been content to let the relationship sit at one of "the spec goes out, the code comes back," and he insists on drawing up the spec without a lot of input most of the time.
The day-to-day job feels secretarial: Our outside team isn't very disciplined with version control, so I spend a lot of time merging their changes and pushing them through the staging process. My boss is the classic super-intelligent autodidact, which means he's making up a lot as he goes along. Meetings to discuss a new feature or design are more like long, meandering lectures. It takes a major investment to divert him from anything he wants to do in the way he's decided it needs to be done. At this point I'd be willing to attempt even poorly thought out development projects, but as I noted, they just get handed off anyhow. I've asked for more in-depth work, but only had one project where I was allowed to dig in and see things all the way through. It ended successfully -- I delivered more than anyone asked for in the right timeframe -- but when I said I wanted more like it, I was laughed off ("Who doesn't want more time to do what they like?")
Finally, the company's a mess. Recent losses have caused us to drop potentially profitable projects that are 90 percent completed, but poor prioritizing has caused us to spend a lot on projects that are of generally speculative value. I also suspect my boss is characterizing some technical failures dishonestly to his boss, who recently told me he was disappointed I hadn't been willing to support a particular project. I was flabbergasted, because I'd been told specifically to avoid that project outside a few very small contributions the outside team couldn't do on its own.
The paranoid frisson I got from that interaction aside, it's plain that the lack of money is going to keep anyone new from being hired any time soon. After a year of playing code janitor with constant distractions in the form of having to handle end user support and pointy-clicky administration of things like the company email and newsletter systems, I haven't learned much more about web development than I had going in.
My bosses, the CTO and CEO say I'm indispensable to the operation, and that I have a future there, but the whole situation is personally embarrassing: I used to be a pretty damn good editor, content strategist and site architect. Now I'm a hack "developer" in title only who jockeys a CMS around when he's not cleaning up everyone else's version controlled diapers. I'm just not where I wanted to be by now, and the company's money problems -- which the CEO personally called me to brush off in a really weird, rambly, distracted monologue with occasional re-asking me whether I was looking for a different job and reassuring me that things would be turning around soon so I should stay -- are making me nervous. I endured 2000-2002 in dotcoms and survived 80 percent layoffs, but like I said earlier, I felt like I was awesome back then and anyone would have been stupid to lay me off. Now I feel thoroughly disposable and I don't think, were I running my own company, I'd hire myself for my current position.
I'm willing to accept that I haven't made the most of the last year. My whole situation could well be my own fault. At the same time, I think the company isn't a good place for me, there are signs I'm not being dealt with honestly, I don't think the company has a very bright future, and I think it's time to go. I'm unhappy enough that my wife insists it's time to go.
I guess this is a two-fold question:
1. I took a modest pay cut to get this job, and was told (not promised, just told) that once the company picked up the internal development staff I'd be managing that I'd be getting a raise along with my promotion. I can't afford to slip any further in pay, but I don't feel any more marketable than I did a year ago. In some ways, I've learned enough to ruin most of the confidence I had coming in and I feel less marketable. What are my chances that I'm going to see north of $70,000 a year in a non-senior-level web developer position should I choose to go out and find one in an attempt to get back on the rails? I have so little faith in the company's judgment that I feel grossly overpaid for how little I know. If that sounds like a completely unreasonable salary, I need to hear that.
2. If there's no salvaging my career change (where salvage involves not going down any further in pay or self esteem), how do I frame this one-year stint? How do recruiters and HR people see this sort of change? What kinds of questions should I anticipate, what kinds of negative perceptions might I be dealing with, and how should I craft my résumé to deal with them?
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Add your job to your resume, highlighting your accomplishments and any specific skills, software, etc that you've learned.
Just start applying for jobs that sound interesting to you. Think of it this way, you have two different skills! No one needs to know you were paid less.
If you still think you'd like to persue the Web Design, apply to more and better Web Design jobs. Check it out, you now have 18-months of experience.
If you want to go back to your previous job, apply to those kinds of openings.
You now have twice the chance of quickly geting a new job.
Recruiters and HR people often don't know the difference between the two jobs you were describing. Basically, if you tick the boxes on the form, you'll get an interview.
posted by Ruthless Bunny at 11:18 AM on July 18, 2012