It’s official, the contract will come to an end on the 31st of August. So after seventeen extensions and two separate contracts totalling ten years and one month, this employer has decided to let me go. I was originally brought into the company (four companies ago) because I could spell EMC and DG, my first major task was the performance tuning of some Siemens Nixdorf RM600 servers with major performance problems. The result was in improvement in performance of 25%, not that I did this alone – there were many people involved.
It will be all change for the people left behind, there are around 700 in the UK IT divisions probably around 100 of them are contract personnel – most of the contractors will be let go before the end of the year probably. The remainder will stay for some time, well till the legacy applications go probably. The permanent staff will be tupped over to a new employer, or let go.
I will be sad to leave this employer, prior to this contract I had never been anywhere longer than 19 months – just come in do the job and sod off. I count many of my colleagues as friends, something that I don’t do lightly – so for me it will be an end of an era experience. For the people left behind I suspect that it will be the beginning of a pretty bumpy ride, this ride will probably not have a happy ending for many of those remaining behind.
There have been many changes of direction over the years, with four owners of the company it’s pretty inevitable I suppose. The last two years of the contract has focused on the virtulisation of some 200 applications and the relocation to a European data centre. During this period I have experienced all the emotions, frustration, elation, anger, happiness and the desire to choke the living shit out of some one – mostly project managers I think! But they didn’t have an exclusive lock on that emotion, there were plenty of others that were in serious danger.
The European model has proven to be massively expensive, the organisations IT costs have probably trebled over the past two years – due mainly to the charging model adopted in Europe. As an example the charge to our only customer has increased massively and what a surprise they are looking to reduce the cost. This would seem to all be at the behest of our European masters and will certainly be a requirement if the parent company is ever going to reduce it’s debt burden. Anyway it would seem that the translation of the original “we will love you forever”, actually meant “we will love you forever if you are cheap to run”.