Aww. How sweet of Vadim. It's a "Thank You" card for me from our Russian programmer. He gave notice last Friday I think, and I've heard his last day will be next Friday. He was in the office yesterday looking happier than I've seen him in years, with a newfound spring in his step. He does work from home a day or two a week, and wasn't in today, but left me this card last night on top of my keyboard. Dave got one as well.Things got so bad at work that he quit without even having another job lined up. Believe me, many of us have contemplated doing so in recent months. The pressure is insane.
Vadim and I got along really well. I never barked instructions at him saying "I don't care how you do it--just do it" or anything like that. I always tested new executables, and if there were problems, I'd find them within minutes, while the source code was still fresh in his mind, so he didn't have to waste time tracking down where to look to implement a fix two weeks after he'd moved on to something else. And I was willing to spend an hour or two with him picking through code trying to backtrack to what the real cause of the problem was, because often what I saw happen to the numbers was caused farther back down the line than I would have thought. What that means is that perhaps an internal number was being miscalculated that had a ripple effect on other numbers that were calculated later and ultimately displayed as output in the report.
Programmers, like anyone else, really appreciate it when you don't try to tell them how to do their job, but offer a few suggestions as to where to start looking for the source of the problem . . . in other words, help them do their job. Maybe he wasn't the fastest programmer, but in the end, he always got it right.
It probably helps that I used to do a bit of programming myself, and have my own experience tracking down bugs, even though I never programmed in C++. I was formally taught FORTRAN in college as a chemical engineering major, never got the hang of COBOL after I switched to business, and taught myself BASIC for DOS 1.0 after I started working and had to learn it. The senior programmers, as opposed to the 20-somethings, have a good laugh with me when I freely admit that the last time I wrote any source code was 10 years ago, and at the time it was in GWBasic for DOS. God was I thrilled that my employer sprung for a copy of that software that actually came with a compiler so that I could create an executable from the native source code. Guys, I can read source code, but I can't write it anymore . . ..
They appreciate it because I'm not stepping on their toes acting like some bitchy know-it-all. If this thank you card doesn't prove that, I don't know what does. Adding his home email address means that he wants to stay in touch. I'm really going to miss Vadim. He was always perfectly professional, and although he has a great sense of humor, enjoying a good joke as much as the next person, he was never the type to do more than fantasize about playing a practical joke on anyone--at work, anyway.
Losing Vadim from staff is a bit like having a death in the family, but he seems so happy that I can't help but wish him the best.
posted by Admin at 4:23 PM
2 Comments:
I never had to do that but it's amazing how much a job can suck to push somebody that far. I wish him luck.
I never had to do that either. Never even got laid off until five years ago during the dot-bomb era, but I was negotiating a request-for-proposal from my current employer the very morning I got laid off. Fortunately, by then it no longer had a stigma attached to it.
When I called to let my sales rep know, and tell her who would continue discussions on the subject moving forward, she told me to email over my resume, because they'd been looking for a research director for a year. I thought she'd been kidding over the previous year when she kept telling me I should come to work for her company, but she hadn't.
I did, and after one interview with two people I'd known for years, I was hired. Out of work for only three weeks before starting at my current employer, and I was given six weeks severance by the old company. Getting paid by two employers for nearly a month was nice.
I was very lucky. But it also helped that I'd maintained good relations with these people over the years. It's somewhat funny that my previous employer asked for references not from my previous employers, but from the vendors with whom I dealt for data and software contracts, and ultimately it was one of those companies that hired me. Even the people at the company that laid me off were amazed at how quickly I was able to find another job. But I never was the type to make a vendor's rep's life a living hell simply because I was the client and in a position to do it. Some clients are like that--they really should work at some place like the DMV where small-minded people get off on giving everyone grief because they can.
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