Screwed at work

For the last several years, I’ve been managing the Blackboard course management system for a college; it’s where professors can put up course material, teach, and generally enhance teaching. I’ve been doing whatever I could to make it easy to use, to try to increase faculty use, to answer every question, to find ways to make the system more flexible, and to wrestle with a pretty complicated program, made more complicated by decisions beyond my control.

Yesterday, I was told I would no longer be handling Blackboard.

It had nothing to do with my work; it was pure College politics. The School of Science made a lot of noise and everyone caved. They will be taking things over as soon as possible.

Ironically, the main precipitating issue was a complaint by a teacher there. She was having a problem uploading a file. I checked and found no problem with the system, so I suggested that she contact the person in charge of the SOS (yes, that’s their abbreviation) network. (As background, last year the SOS insisted they could run their own network and they didn’t want I&TS to be involved with their computers – they got their wish.) So the problem was either due to something in their network restricting access, or due to some issue with the individual user’s machine, neither of which I was allowed to deal with.

Now, the people who screwed up are the ones who will be running the system.

This is wrong on all sorts of levels, but the worst is the fact that I was never consulted on this until it was a done deal. My boss has always been a good guy about things, but he made the decision and kept me completely in the dark about it until yesterday morning. Yes, I would have objected, but at least I would have felt my input and hard work was respected.

The only good thing is that I’m not losing my job over this, and I will be reassigned (but it would have been nice to know this in advance; I haven’t slept in two nights worrying). (As I’m writing this, he just came in and said he does have some projects for me.)

Perhaps I have too much ownership of the project, but I still think this is a bad decision on all levels and hate to see my hard work turned over to people who won’t be able to handle it (it was at least 75% of my time, and the person who will take over my responsibilities already has full-time responsibilities – I’m not even sure if he has the skill set necessary to do what needs to be done).

While all organizations/workplaces seem to have a knack for screwing up processes that aren’t broken, educational institutions seem to have perfected this practice.

Seems like your employer is giving you a good lesson on why you shouldn’t give a shit about your work. And - speaking from my experience - the effect of a number of such incidents of the years is really cumulative, where eventually you lose interest in much other than collecting your paycheck while avoiding notice/potential blame.

Sorry to hear about this, but glad you still have a job.

A few life lessons to keep in mind:

  1. If you leave, the operation will continue on without you.
  2. If you give 110% or 80%, you’ll still only get 100% of your salary.
  3. It’s sad how much stupidity can occur in a successful economy. :wink:

Let them have it and screw it up. Note with evil glee in the back of your mind that your predictions came through. Then get over it and move on to bigger and better things. You’re a creator…hone your craft as you’re adding to the positive karma of the universe. (No…really!)

I’ve been a self-motivated go-getter in State Gubment for more than 12 years. I’ve lost track of the times I’ve provided a jewel of increased productivity, only to have it break when it left my care. You can’t do everything, and you can’t take it personally.

Chuck, I know your location is listed as Schenectady, but is this by any chance Dartmouth College?

No, not Dartmouth.

This is all part of a larger issue at the college. We have a lame duck president (he’ll be out in May). Our Vice President of Acadmic Affairs does whatever the loudest voice wants to do, with no overarching plan. The SOS people think they know computers (they don’t; it’s much different between computer science – programming and such – and running a network). We have been working to get a better web page for over 10 years (really), and have spent over a year and a half pouring money down ratholes without a thing to show for it except for $40K worth of software that refuses to work (and no one cares that it doesn’t work).

My boss is sick of the battles; I understand that. And this is a terrible decision. But the worst part of it was that he didn’t tell me his plans until after it was all decided; it felt like a knife in the back, especially since I’ve had a good relationship with him.

I wouldn’t have liked it if he told me in advance, and would have argued strongly against it. But at least if the decision was made I would have felt that my opinion was respected.

It’s just college politics. 5 will get you 10 that in 2 years you’ll be back in charge again. It’s just the way it is.

When I worked at a college, my new boss was an ass. He told me that he wanted to get to know the people on campus better, and would I mind if he took over my spot on some committees. He’s my boss, and so how can I say no? So a while later, I run into some of the movers and shakers on campus, and they say, why didn’t you tell us you hated serving on those committees? Me: :confused:

Turns out Fred the Evil Boss had told everyone the reason he had replaced me on those committees was because he was tired of my bitching about them. I never bitched about them. He was just a lying sack of Fred.

You said it yourself - right in the quote above is why your boss didn’t tell you in advance. He’s sick of the battles. It’s easier for him to give it up and not listen to your arguments than to fight either them or you. I’d also bet he’s quite aware of everything you’d say, so he didn’t feel the need to hear you say it.

And I’d also bet that Campion is right - unless this school has some sort of major pull on the rest of the schools and departments who are using this system, it’ll end up coming back to you after they’ve screwed it up and annoyed the hell out of everyone else.

(BTW, I’m in a similar situation on a smaller scale at another university - I don’t take it personally if someone decides to pull one of my duties and give it to someone else who purportedly has the Newest Best Idea How To Do It - because inevitably they don’t and it ends up coming right on back here. It’s actually sort of amusing).

Please tell me it’s not Union.

On second thought, if it is I’d feel better about not giving them money every time they call me begging.

I also work for a Univeristy, and I sympathize with you. My position, and others like mine, are being “re-classified” by HR. Whatever that means.

A sidenote on your user name, OP. My husband calls me Chuck. Neither of us remember how this started. As a joke, the students call me “Professor Chuck”. (I’m an administrator, not a Professor, so this is pretty funny to me.)

No, not Union (My alma mater, too, BTW).

It’s the school a few miles north of Albany best known for its Division I basketball program.

Here’s the headline for the University of Wisconsin canceling a $26,000,000 already spent software project, that didn’t in anyway function. The link has the headline, but the article is removed for copyright reasons on the site.
$26,000,000 and we have nothing.

I’ve set up systems to later have them destroyed in about that way. It sucks, but once you realise you won’t have to fix it, it’s not as bad. You can even gloat at how fucked up it gets, before they relise they are fucked. I couldn’t even wipe the shit eating grin off my face when I saw them later, and I could tell they knew why, which made it impossible to get the shit eating gring off my face for the next 30 minutes.

Hmph. There must be something about that dollar amount. It’s roughly what my department paid Accenture for a broken, unfinished solution. It was originally a 40 Mil project, we spent 25 mil on it, fired the contractor, then spent ANOTHER 2 mil looking at the junkpile to see what we could re-use.

The mind, it boggles.

Gee, that makes the quarter of a million dollars (at least) we spent on website redesign in the past two years a bargain (and after all the work, we have the same web design we had when we started). The saga of the college web page is mind boggling; they’ve been wanting to redesign it for ten years and have only made a few small cosmetic changes. It’s really embarassing, especially since websites are usuall the first impression a college makes.

Well, if what my sister (who went there) says is still true the brothers’ top six institutional priorities all revolve around maintaining the basketball players’ eligibility.

I’d be surprised if the website was even on their radar.

See that annoys the hell out of me. You tell me to make something, I tell you how long it will take to make, and exactly that long later, it’s sitting on your desk.

People just don’t understand that programmers aren’t interchangeable. You pick a poor programmer up front, and try and force a project through to the end, and you’re going to end up with a piled up mess of unreadable code that programmer after programmer stares at till their eyes bleed, and finally punts to someone else.

And simply, no program in the world should cost $40 million to make. The Windows kernel probably had 6 to 12 programmers getting paid $50-70k a year, and took a year to develop, plus then another 6 to 12 people to test it each making $40-50k, plus some sort of lead designer ($80k) and a project manager ($70.) So overall, you can have the core of windows for $1 million, and then adding in the GUI, each of the office applications, SQL Server, and then maybe a few teams to make “Home Editions” and whatnot out of the original code, we’re still only looking at $15 million in development and testing for the entirety of Microsoft’s standard lineup.

Computer games (as of about 2000) cost about 1 million in development, for a development time of 1 year (so this lines up with my guesstimation above), and come out well designed, have a whole heck of a lot of intricate details, anti-hacking code, and polygons per frame counts at frames per second that are staggering when compared to the fact that Windows has a hard time updating the screen when you just close a window.

Know who you’re hiring to make your business level solution, darnit.

Eh. Duties come and go at jobs; like others have said, you’ll probably get this one back after a year or so. Don’t take it so seriously, man. You’ll give yourself an ulcer.

Tell me about it. Our HR system is designed to be as unbiased as possible (not to say it doesn’t get tweaked, but in theory, the best person gets the job.

We hire a few REALLY talented telco people to sign off on the qualifications. They don’t. But management decides to go through and cut the checks anyway.

I’m personally embarrased and think it’s the biggest waste of my tax payers money I’ve ever seen.

The basketball is rarely an issue: they pay the coach a lot (he makes more than the college president, but, then I make more than the college president) and certainly coddle the players, but that’s rarely an issue (when I was teaching, the basketball players in my course were no different than other students – other than the fact that one missed time because of the NCAA tournament, time he made up afterwards). The basketball team is a profit center independent from the college.

The main source of the general sickness is pure lack of leadership and inability to see things for the college as a whole. Departments are fragmented and act like spoiled children, especially with IT. If they don’t get what they want, then they keep whining about small problems – all designed to be sure they get things under their control and their way. And no one is willing to say, “No. This is better for the college as a whole.”

I got another glimpse: one of the people who engineered this was pointing out he was having a problem with the system. I asked why he didn’t bring this to my attention. “It was during class.” (So, why didn’t he bring it to my attention after class?) Then, he said, “But whenever I’ve called Chuck about a problem, he was very responsive and fixed it at once.”

So if I’m responsive to problems, why not tell me when you have one instead of saying that they need to run the system for it to work properly?

At this point, I’m moving on. I plan to stand back and watch the train wreck. It reminds me of the Monty Python Vocational Guidance Counselor sketch, where the accountant want to be a lion tamer, because he figures he can tame a lion, since their a foot high and eat ants. Like him, they’re looking at an anteater and think they can handle it easily, but they’re going to find out it’s a lion.

I think I would enjoy watching that. But then again, I’m by no means a model employee. :smiley: