Leaving El Dorado County for the State of California
It was 1995. The year of the O.J. Trial and the Million Man March in Washington DC. It was also the year of the Oklahoma City bombing. On the lighter side there was the movie “Toy Story”. The Number 1 Billboard song for '95: Coolio's Gangsta's Paradise.
I was looking for a new job. I had put 7 years in at El Dorado County which was a PERS organization. I was initially thinking of returning to private industry but my mother-in-law, who had a long career working in IT for the State of California, encouraged me to think about looking at the state, since I had those 7 years in the same retirement program that the State of California used. She had worked her way up to upper management and was familiar with many of the state's top IT managers. She pointed out that while state government was much larger than El Dorado size had advantages. There were many departments each with an IT division and this would provide me options. If I didn't like the department I was working in there would be lots of others to choose from. She provided me a list of a few departments with an IT director I might work well with. So I took the state exam and started looking for open programming positions in those departments.
I applied for a few openings and secured a few interviews. I chose a position with the Department of Corrections because I got a good impression/feeling about the person I would be working directly for and Linda spoke highly of their IT director. She had worked with him in the past. As you would suspect the California Department of Corrections is a very large department. They were in the midst of a large project. They were building a new comprehensive offender tracking system and I liked the idea of being part of a new project. When they called me to offer me a position, I gladly accepted.
Back at El Dorado County I met with Ollie, my manager. I gave him the news that I was leaving. He expressed some disappointment but I don't think he was too surprised. It was much tougher telling my co-leader Linda. We had worked closely together for pretty much all of those seven years and had formed a pretty tight bond. She would now be the acting manager. I felt bad leaving her with the way things were but she knew it was time for me to go. As it turned out, Linda didn't last too much longer either. She got a new position working for Sonoma County with our old boss John who had taken a position as the county's CIO there.
A goodbye lunch was held for me. These typically drew between 20 and 30 people but 48 people decided to show up for my lunch (guess they were really excited to see me go). Ollie expressed surprise at the large turnout. Ollie may not have understood me but he liked me. On my last day he asked me into his office where he thanked me and gave me a parting gift. I was ready to leave the county but it was bitter-sweet.
The county was interesting to work for and for the most part I enjoyed it. There were numerous challenges. The thing about the County was that most of the people working there really cared about doing what they thought was good for the County. The problem was, of course, there was little agreement of just what that was and the weak leadership did not help. I developed a number of friendships there but, as is one of my talents, I have lost contact with almost every one of them. However, I did stay in contact with Linda and Wilma. Kris and I attended a number of parties/gatherings at their house, generally involving Karaoke. Wilma had a music room that had a small stage/platform with a Karaoke setup. Unfortunately, Wilma passed away in a car accident in Tennessee and Linda later passed away of lung cancer. As I have mentioned, I am not good at staying in touch with people. It's my loss, perhaps it's to their benefit....
A year or two after I left I learned the County paid a contracting firm a million plus to convert their IT systems to handle the 2000 (Y2K) problem. There were all those horror stories in the news about how all the IT software everywhere was going to fail come New Year's Day 2000. The thing was, most of the County's systems had already been modified to handle the year 2000. Realizing that 2000 was right around the corner most of us made that modification when we converted to the IBM . We didn't publicize it because when we initially proposed doing it, the top county officials saw it as an unnecessary expense and nixed it. We, the programming leads, decided to do it anyway and just not publicize it. The county gave all that money to some outside consultants to fix a problem that did not really exist. There was not much more than a handful of programs on smaller systems that needed fixing. An average application programmer could have done the changes in a few weeks time. The larger effort would be in finding the programs that needed changing. They either didn't ask the IT department about it or maybe nobody was left who knew about it. If I'd known they were willing to pay that kind of money I would have been glad to do it for half that price. Heck, I already knew which programs needed fixing. I could have done it in a couple of weeks. $500K for a couple of weeks work? Heck yeah!
Up to this point I had worked for mostly small organizations, not counting the US Air Force of course. El Dorado County was one of the largest organizations I'd worked for. Now I was going to work for the State of California that made El Dorado County look like a small organization. I was starting at a Programmer Analyst position. At this point I had 17 years of experience much of it in a higher position. I was taking a pretty good pay cut but it was going to be nice to just be a plain programmer again. I was looking forward to it. However, I did wonder that after being in more of a lead position for years and more recently a manager position, how was I going to fare with not being part of the decision making process any longer. Working for the State was going to be different. How different? I was about to find out....
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