The Great Data Dilemma

I love my new job - it is great for me in so many ways. But perhaps the way that it is worst for me, but I am best for it, is the insane mess that is its data storage. I swear I am going to clean this mess up, if it takes me a decade to do it, which it probably will. Just some of the highlights (lowlights?) include:


1. Obsession with hard copies.

For being such a small business (there are only 8 employees with computer access) my work has a very progressive server backup schedule. In addition to complete backups done every night, there are incremental backups done throughout the day. But that isn't enough for the owners to feel safe about our data, and so every document that is on our servers is also in our filing cabinets. My office alone has three filing cabinets (with a forth coming soon) plus about 25 three inch binders that are all just old document storage; every office is like this because we have 20 years worth of everything the company has ever done.




2. Absurd file structure

I know a lot of companies are guilty of this, but my current one is one of the worst, that is having files on the server laid out in a way that is completely nonsensical. All of the transgressions that you can have in file structure are committed here, from poorly named folders to empty folders to folders that contain a single sub-folder to data that belongs in one place being spread out over several places. I have already done some work to cleaning this up, but I don't see myself attacking any of the biggest issues for at least a year or two.




3. Drawing naming system

While a lot of files have very poor names, we have so many drawings and are so dependent on them the absurdity that is our system for naming drawing stands out as the worst. The structure was borrowed from a company where the two owners used to work together, at a time that drawings were done by hand. I can see how it could work in a filing cabinet, but it is a very poor structure to use with electronic files (because it makes it very difficult to find the file you want). I have already come up with a good alternative, but I am not going to proposing it for some time, both because I know they are quite enamored with the current structure and because I know the work involved in changing over would be gargantuan.

4.  Interlinking files

One of the reasons that changing the drawing naming structure would be insane is that the company loves having Solidworks files refer to other  Soildworks files. Sometimes interlinking the files this way is a perfectly sensibly way to ensure that any future changes propagate through all connected files, but it is used so aggressively in this company that it can have the opposite effect, that changes that are meant to affect only a small number of parts could make unintended changes elsewhere.




5. Poor choice of file type

My company has a whole lot of data stored in Excel files and Word files. This data is so full of relationships that even the Excel files are poor choices; what is really needed is a database. I decided early on that this was going to be the first of the data management problems that I tackle, but it is such a huge problem that knowing where to start has been troublesome. Originally I was going to start with moving the part numbers spreadsheet into a database both because it would be easy to do and because so much of the other data really should be linked together via the part numbers. However, I have since decided that the best starting point is with smaller data sets that are primarily used by myself; I suspect that there will be no resistance when I suggest moving those over, and once I have them up and running, they can be used to demonstrate the advantages of a database in selling my bosses on changing other information into a database format.

My Successful Interviews

Between December 2012 and February 2014 I had five different full time jobs. As I've only actually been an Engineering Technologist for a little under 3 years, towards the end of that stretch I was beginning to question whether I had made the right choice when I left my IT career behind in August of 2009.

Of course, going back was never really an option - I am too heavily invested in my new career, and I am too far out of touch with the changes that have happened in IT. But even if I could change all that I still wouldn't go back to my previous career because of one incredibly huge factor - interviews.

Now I realize that somewhere in the neighborhood of everybody hates interviews. I like to think that I hate them even more than most being that I pretty much hate talking to people in nearly all circumstances, but even if I don't have a privileged level of interview hate, for much of my life they were my bane.

In all the years I was in IT and also in all the years before I was in IT I had a horrible conversion rate of interviews to jobs. I didn't track my employment searches back then the way I do now, so I can't say with certainty that my numbers for that time aren't tainted by bias, but I feel pretty sure that from the moment I actually started working for a living till when I decided to go to NAIT I averaged about one job for every ten interviews.

There were some stretches where I did somewhat better, and others where I did far worse, but overall I always seemed to be hovering around that 10% mark.

Since I graduated from NAIT and have been applying for Mech Tech jobs, I have been averaging one job for every three interviews. In fact, in that stretch of fifteen months where I was so frequently unemployed I was doing slightly better than one in three.

Why was there such a drastic improvement? Obviously there are a lot of factors that are difficult to measure, such as:

• I am seeking higher level positions than I used to. 
• The candidate pool in the jobs I apply to now is generally smaller than it was for other jobs I applied to before. 
• HR trends vary both over time and by industry.
• I am better educated in my current field than any previous one I worked in.

But I am going to say that I think these are not the primary issue; the primary issue is that there is one type of question which was unavoidable in the interviews I used to do, and yet has almost never comes up any more. That question, which was the bane of my existence for so many years goes like this

"Tell me about a time when x happened and how you dealt with it."

I am not much of an oral storyteller, and I tend to forget most of the mundane things that happen in my life; actually, I think part of how I was able to survive for so long in call centres is that my brain would so quickly purge the details of these meaningless calls. I can remember a number of calls from my first couple years on the phones when everything was fresh and new, but I couldn't tell you about a single call I took in the last five years I was on the phone; and most of those forgotten calls were forgotten before I started my next shift.

So interviewers would ask me to remember a story, which I couldn't, and I'm an even worse liar than I am a storyteller (so there was no point in trying to BS them). So I would often spend a long time trying to come up with an answer that would be very underwhelming. In one particularly bad interview there were multiple times I sat in silence for two or three minutes trying to come up with an answer before admitting "I don't have an answer for that."

I don't know if its because of the level of the positions I am applying for or if its because the positions usually are not ones with a lot of customer contact, but only twice in all the interviews I have done for Mech Tech positions has that question ever come up, and both times it was "Tell me about a time when you had a problem with a co-worker and how you dealt with it."

So that, in a nutshell is why I think I am getting more jobs now. But even with the success I have found, I still hate them and will happily quote to anyone who cares to listen studies that have shown that interviewing is pretty much the worst way possible of determining the best candidate.

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

So yesterday I started a new job; my fourth in the last 13th months (fifth if you count the part time job I have had concurrently with different full time jobs). With each new job I have taken up the keyboard and tried to express some optimism, and so I find myself doing that again today.

There certainly are some easily quantifiable aspects of my job with Envacon that make it superior to what has come before it. My annual salary is higher, if only marginally, than what I made at Entrec. I have a private office just like a did at Armour Clad (and while the new office is half the size, my office at Armour Clad was right by the bathroom, and the acoustics from there carried too well.) And while FA gave me good hardware, and Metal Fab gave me top end software, Envacon is the first to give me a high end computer plus all the software I need to actually get my job done.

But the thing is, I've done the "look at why this job is better than my last" rig-a-more-roll before. I argued for each of my jobs in 2013 that they were the job I have been waiting for, that I would like to work and stay at for years to come. Everyone of those predictions failed, so why wouldn't this one? A big part of what made those predictions failures is that they were predictions in the face of negative perceptions; I wanted to love the jobs I got, and so when I saw things that bothered me I buried those feeling deep, then would write the praises of the new job.

The day I arrived at Entrec they didn't have a desk for me; that problem would never be resolved. I worked in a small room with two other guys, and but for my boss and the IT manager I never even got a hello from another person in the building. I had a leery feeling about the place from day one, and it never went away. Because I didn't have my own desk I had my trainer sitting next to me watching and critiquing my ever click, and that is in the end what led to my being fired.

I praised Entrec for the money, the shorter commute, and how interesting the work sounded. Though the positives were never enough to balance the negatives, and I was doomed to lose that job

The day I met Ken, the owner of Armour Clad I felt he was someone I would have trouble working for; he was both an egomaniac and a micro-manager. I didn't like that he wanted me to take a big pay cut for the first 90 days I worked there, with the understanding he would bring my pay up at the end of the 90 days.

I praised Armour Clad for the giant private office they gave me, and for giving me a chance to be an estimator. However, I would learn fairly quickly that what I liked so much about estimating in school, is just a small part of what the job involves in real life, and I despise what estimating is really about. Its just as well Ken fired me, because I probably wouldn't have lasted much longer.

While I perhaps ignored some strong warning signs at Entrec and Armour Clad, I can probably forgive myself for not paying attention to the signs of trouble at Metal Fab. Metal Fab are a bunch of cheapskates. Just walking in the building last summer it was easy to see that the furniture was old and the building was ancient and in need of repairs. All over the building were signs of just how cheap the company was. Most obvious to me was that as a drafter I didn't get a real cube,  my monitors were rather small, my computer was very slow, and for one crucial piece of software we didn't have enough licenses.

I praised Metal Fab because it seemed like a good fit for my skills and everyone there was genuinely a pleasure to work with. But on day one I was bothered by the the company's unwillingness to invest in vital equipment; I should have guessed that would also mean that they would rather lay off skilled workers than pay them during a down turn.

And so that brings me back to my new company Envacon.

As of yesterday, this is my life.

Before I say anything else about them, I should explain how I got the position. A friend put me in touch with them just after they received notice from their Mech Tech that he would be leaving. I was told it was too soon for them to do an interview, but that they would love to have a short cup of coffee with me. A short coffee turned into a long coffee, turned into a tour of the facility and meeting the other owner. By the end of two hours they had all but told me I was going to be hired, and the next day they made it official.

I have had to fight tooth and nail for pretty much every job I've ever gotten. Not being much of a people person, I am lousy at networking, and so I have never been hired like this before. I can't tell you how good getting this job in this way made me feel; for once I feel like a company truly wants me rather than is merely settling on me.

The only reservations or bad feelings I have ever had about this job are that I have worried a little bit that I am in over my head (which they have done a wonderful job of lessening by making it clear that I will not be expect to learn things fast nor truly replace the eight year veteran whose job I am getting) and it has occurred to me that with the owners of the company being in their late 50s that they might just sell the company off when they reach a certain age.

So to end things on a high note, here's a quick list of all the awesome things about my new job

• Very short commute
• Job has a lot of variety
• Pay is the highest annual salary I've ever received (though lack of benefits lessens this)
• A lot of my previous skills are relevant to the job (even help desk)
• I will be learning a lot of new skills that are very marketable
• Job will help me get my CET and other certifications
• Private office, 2nd floor with nice view
• Bosses seem like two of the nicest bosses I have ever met