A new IT hire's probationary period unearths problems caused by a penny-pinching boss I went to work in the IT department for an insurance company at the start of the year. As a new hire I was in a 90-day probation period, during which time I was to be restricted from most of the administrative system access and allowed to only do simple, entry-level work. I was also required to meet weekly with my new boss and discuss what I was working on and how I was doing. I quickly learned that my new boss tripped over dollars to save dimes, an example of which is how she handled the e-mail server.The business was very dependent on e-mail for communicating with insurance agents in the field. On my first day, I noticed that all of the IT team members were receiving regular e-mails that the Exchange e-mail server was running out of drive space. Since I got a warning e-mail multiple times a day about it, I asked my boss about the e-mail server situation at our weekly meetings. Her regular response was not to worry about it. Due to her lack of concern about the e-mail server and what I thought was some other strange behavior, I kept my job search going.I started to notice that my boss would blow all the log files away on a regualr basis to gain space. Eventually, that trick didn’t work anymore. She then stated that the “users” had lots of old mail we could delete and we’d be OK — not sure why she didn’t run an e-mail usage report to discover that wasn’t true. I was not allowed access to the e-mail server during my probationary period, so I had to take her word for it. Eventually, I was told to send a message to all the e-mail users to clean up their mailboxes. If they didn’t know how to delete or archive mail more than two weeks old, I was to help them get it done. Needless to say, this was too little, too late and the e-mail server ran completely out of space. The e-mail server was up and down repeatably for three days while we waited for the “bargain” drives my boss had ordered to show up since she had them shipped “ground” to save even more money.One month into the new job, it was decided to outsource the hardware and software support of the Web site, so the job I was hired to do at the end of my probationary period was going away. My boss was going to keep me on board, but in an entry-level support position. This led me to start asking some of the other employees about the history of the IT team. I discovered I was one in a long run of IT hires who left the company after a very short tenure. This also explained the distant attitude the other employees had towards me. I found out there was a running joke about how long it would be before I quit! The 90-day probationary period I was working under had been put in place because my boss didn’t want to go through the workout of updating all of the security access when the new hires up and quit. I completed the self-fulfilling prophecy of IT hires at this company and accepted another position after two months. Data Management