Scooter Chronicles

I am switching job again. I know what you are thinking.

“Are you mad?”

“Isn’t this the fourth time in under two years?”

“Didn’t you find a very good permanent job this last time?”

Yes would be the answer to the last two questions. Oh, let’s be honest here. It’s probably the answer to the first as well.

I am going back to a former employer that has changed much of what I didn’t like about them. In this process of finding another job, I actually had two offers to consider. And this all happened very fast.

There are a few reasons I am leaving my current employer, but mostly due to lack of a long-term future. I hired into Lehigh Cement with the hope that I could stay there for a long, long time. There were two guys that I would be working with that had been there for over 20 years each. About two months into my tenure there, they announced a merger with a company known as Hanson Aggregates. The new company would be known as Lehigh Hanson. Three months after the official announcement, they let the employees of Lehigh’s headquarters know that they were ready to roll out their new business plan. They scheduled the conference for the day before the company Christmas party. At this conference they informed a little over 100 employees (a few short of half the office) that they would be losing their job, all being phased out by June of 2008. The engineering group that I work for, known as HTC, would be staying … for now. Also, the company headquarters would now be located in Dallas, the home of Hanson, and their CEO would be the CEO of the newly merged company. The two top executives of Lehigh would be displaced. One was retiring, and his successor was going back to his old position.

Two weeks later at the HTC Christmas luncheon, the president of HTC said that we needed to keep our heads down and work hard to prove ourselves worthy of continuing our work. That didn’t fill me with confidence. At that point, I was about 50% billable, meaning that half of my time I was sitting around with nothing to do. And part of that was taken up by a project that I was only to do when I had nothing to do, which was pretty much most of the time.

Now here in early April, my billable hours have dropped to about 20%. Also, some of the work that I had been given was taken away from me to be given to a vendor. This was because they had more experience with the particular piece of equipment. Given these two factors, which had been going on since January, I didn’t see much of a future at Lehigh Hanson. It wouldn’t take much for a bean counter in Dallas to start asking, “Why are we paying this guy to sit around 80% of the week when we can pay a vendor for only the hours they work on our projects?” There is also a feeling that eventually there would be pressure to move HTC to Dallas in the next few years. Even if I was to be bold enough to think that they would ask me to move to Dallas with the rest of the company, my answer would be no. So that would leave me looking for a job again.

I want to work for a company that will keep me busy, give me challenging projects to work on, and will pay me a fair wage. This former employer that I am going back to is now giving me that. In the almost two years I have been gone they have restructured the company, offered much better health insurance, and now have offered me a good salary and a great amount of paid vacation. Had I known that things could have or would have happened I might have never left in the first place. (Though I might have had a hand in bringing about these changes since about a dozen of us left at the same time giving the same reasons for leaving.) I was comfortable there, and really liked the engineers and the checker I worked with. I am going in with a different perspective, and hopefully I won’t be thinking about other jobs for a long, long time.