I’m out. Peace.

Yesterday was my last day at what is now my PreviousJob. The scheduled team farewell lunch was canceled (too much work), but my boss wrote a poem entitled Ode to Charles. It was nice. I’ve got some stuff to take care of these next few days, and I’ll be starting my CurrentPosition (at Cardinal Stritch University) on Monday.

It has been my experience that when a person leaves a company, (some) people that remain use their absence as a way to either cover up their own mistakes/failures or to boost their own image. This is just a crumby way to be, but it does raise an interesting set of issues and challenges if the person who left comes back. I expect to have to deal with some of this at my CurrentPosition.

I started work there in April of 2002 with the useful instruction “Build an Intranet.” That was it… that was the whole job, and so I did. Here’s the situation at the time:

• We were running this terrible email server [IMail]
• The Windows Domain+Active Directory was very new and not really ready for prime time
• We had contracted with a small local company on a few projects… they elected to use ColdFusion (yikes!)
• I was not provided any information about the web-based student information system we’d purchased but not yet implemented
• ASP.NET was still 1.0 and was not being used anywhere else in the organization
• I knew some Classic ASP and knew that is sucked… bad!
• I new a fair amount of PHP

And so, I built the intranet suite with PHP and MS-SQL, eventually integrating it with the new MS-Exchange server, the new student information system, Active Directory, and the financial aid systems. I knew that my boss had taken a chance hiring me and I wanted to make sure that he did not regret it, so I turned this project around in a few months. It was still being used 5 years later, though it had needed a lot of attention.

Somewhere along the line, the University decided to redesign their marketing website and needed a CMS solution. The site was pretty complex and required integration with a number of internal systems, so a custom solution seemed in order. PHP and MS-SQL had served well for the intranet and there was a bit of a time crunch, so the new custom StritchCMS was built onto the Intranet. Almost as soon at that was finished, the new version of the student information system was released, shiny and new with .NET, and so we had to get this up and running. It was not a bad system, but it was a big change in the way the University did business. This was good news and had the potential to really move the University forward. The bad news was that the head of my department decided that this new system would not be supported by the PC Support area. Instead, all support calls related to this University wide, paradigm changing, not-entirely-welcome application would be supported by one person: Me.

And that, dear friends, is when things started going downhill. More hacks where put in place to address short term needs, more projects were delayed and delayed as more and more time was spent supporting this application (not to mention the Intranet and the CMS, neither of which were supported by the PC Support area). Sleep was lost… hair was lost… motivation was lost. It sucked, and I ended up leaving an organization I believed in and had genuinely enjoyed.

But, you may be asking yourself, why would I go back to that? Here’s why:

• New boss; Right before I left, the University had hired a new head of the technology department. I participated in the selection process, and I thought she would be great… but I left before she started.
• New position; I’m returning to the University in a new position, doing more front end, consumer facing stuff.
• Same mission; I always thought that the work the University did was important and it was difficult to leave.
• Gotta get back to school; My PreviousJob didn’t really allow me the time or $$$ to get back to school.

I think it’ll be good… and maybe people took the high road.