The game with no winner

A coworker’s need to get ahead sabotaged my career from that point forward

Having been a midrange developer, I learned about PC servers, the Blue Screen Of Death, and everything else related to our needs. I oversaw infrastructure growth from barely there with 25 employees to 70 employees, each with a computer, a nine-office WAN, e-mail that Boss said we would never use, voice over IP, and a host of other particulars. I was pleased but overwhelmed.

I took my case to Boss and got approval for a network administrator, who I will call Doom. He was young and relatively inexperienced, yet I saw potential. I offered a generous salary because Boss’s vision was to have a small IT staff — and that required motivated workers.

Doom and I got along great. After many successes, things were clicking. When the BlackBerry arrived, we got approval for morning meetings at the coffee shop. Living near each other, we would meet, find our table, open our laptops, and keep up on the office while discussing work — great in avoiding snowy rush hours. Life was good.

Move ahead to 2003. I forsook further training and certification to work hard fulfilling Boss’s vision. We implemented occasional network stress-test nights and recruited talent to stay late (off the clock) to help test the network. A few rounds of Doom II, pizza, beverages, heads-down destruction. Just fun, interdepartmental bonding. (I was tempted to create a character resembling head of accounting but never did.)

While I was wrapped up in the demands of divorce, Doom saw his chance. I still don’t know the motivation. I’ve never been very good at the political game, so I wasn’t kissing up to our new president like Doom. IT was running smoothly, but my presence and the appearance of progress were affected.

Pres was influenced by trendy tech and didn’t share Boss’s vision. With 130 employees at nine locations, IT had three employees maintaining little downtime, toys for the suits, and reliable systems. Doom and Pres made plans to revamp to a trendier architecture (nice resume fodder for Doom), which was made all the more convenient by Boss’s imminent retirement. I asked my “friend” directly about his closed-door meetings with HR. He stated they were all about personal issues. Days later, they pulled me into the COO’s office (Boss was absent), had the “no problems but we want a change in direction” chat, and walked me out the door. The irony is that things didn’t work out all that much better for Doom — he left shortly thereafter in an attempt to avoid failure.

My life hasn’t been the same since. As former “management,” I continually faced skepticism by employers who assumed I couldn’t manage without a college degree or do tech work because I used to manage. I couldn’t even get a job as a security guard. Even though funding was available from the State, they disallowed assistance for certifications or retraining, stating any new job wouldn’t pay as well and they’d lose funding. After nine months of intense searching, I located a job for one-sixth of my previous salary.

I now pay attention to politics (although I try not to play them much). I work closer to home, have changed jobs five times, net a third of what I used to, and have less stress. I still find myself missing a morning coffee or a nice afternoon cigar with Mr. Doom.