Initiative and foresight unrewarded, IT pro gets revenge for taking lumps by jumping ship In the late 1990s I worked for a Midwestern manufacturer. We ran a very small IT shop for the size of our corporation (8 people for a company grossing a third of a billion dollars annually, across 10 locations), and all of us in IT were expected to wear many hats. I was a programmer, analyst and project manager when I wasn’t network administrator and tech support. From our corporate office, I was directly responsible for five factories around the Great Lakes area, and I also helped out the MIS staff at our factory just down the road.Like many companies at that time, we decided to jump on the ERP bandwagon. All the upper-level execs were involved, as we were going to avoid all of the mistakes that other companies were making, and have a cost-effective and pain-free implementation. I was not involved in the planning, being too low on the totem pole. For the next several months, the bigwigs confabbed while I set about improving our network infrastructure and documenting in-house applications. I couldn’t work on any new projects, as we didn’t know which ERP we would be getting and what would be made obsolete. At one point, the VP of Finance asked the CIO why I still worked there. To his credit, my boss said that although I was not going to be involved in the ERP planning, I would be instrumental in the installation and training. I, of course, brushed up the résumé and prepared for the inevitable.Read more of this tale at InfoWorld’s Off the Record blog Careers