Wednesday, December 07, 2005

Three wishes...

While looking at something else, I came across 3 Things I wish I'd done by Jeanne Sahadi. While Jeanne writes about money and finance related stuff, I think the third point about valuing your work is right on.

Early in my career, I worked for a very large university in their IT department. Just being out of college, I was very grateful to even have a job. But anybody who works in the public sector knows, the pay ain't that great. In order to make ends meet, I started writing code "on the side" with a friend of a friend. I wrote a system in Paradox (version 3.5 for you techno geeks out there) for $10/hr. I got paid, but found out later that the person I was working for billed the client $50/hr for my time. This person then went on to sell this system to other clients and, of course, I didn't have any rights to it.

I also wish I listened to my gut. I had been working at a regional telecom company in the late 1990's. I had been perfectly happy there for three years and the pay was more than adequate. In 1998, during the rise of the dotcom bubble, I was seduced by a consulting company by the promise of 100% bonuses and four day work weeks. I agonized about it for about a week, and although my gut told me it was too good to be true, I jumped ship. After about two weeks I knew I made a mistake, but told myself it would get better. Fortunately, I had a good management team back at the telecom company and kept in touch with them. After two months I decided I'd had enough of consulting and went back to my old job.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

If you had not made all of those decisions, you might not be where you are today. Sometimes a mistake helps us more than not.

Jeff Hunter said...

If you had not made all of those decisions, you might not be where you are today.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

DaPi said...

Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

You decide and then, if you're any good, you make it into a good decision.

Anonymous said...

I find out that the harder I am hit the more I learn.

But these things are not just in our control alone. So many factors which we could have seen before but didnt see, or factors which we could not have seen before but becomes evident later come into play.

And we do take certain factors for granted which may apply to others but may not apply to us because of many reasons.