I may not be around much for a while. I got shafted yesterday at work and was let go for no valid reason. I would go in to the details, but basically my boss was covering his a__ and needed a scape goat because he can't manage people so to save his job, he had to get rid of someone. That someone was me. No verbal warnings, no written warnings, just "see ya!" yesterday. I didn't even get to talk to HR about it, and they have yet to return my calls (it's Friday, so they may not be around). I got so many calls from people last night as word got out and they ones that know what is happening are just about as ticked (keeping this great forum clean, I wanted to use other words) as I am. At least I have witnesses and references, but it is going to be hard to make house payments and so forth as my wife only works part time (they are letting her pick up a few more hours, but not much) as a techer's aide, and we know how little teachers make, let alone teacher's aides.

Our hope, besides getting a new job, is that my wife can somehow get to a level to qualify for health insurance for us.

I am also in the very early stages of trying to take some sort of legal action, but lawyers are hard to get a hold of on a Friday as well, plus with Iowa an "at will" state, I may not have any action that I can take.

Anyway, I know that things will be better in the end, but it is just hard to deal with.

Thanks for listening.

Nick,

I'm sure you don't need to hear me say it, but that is a big steaming pile of crap you were just served. I hope things turn around quickly for you -- either a nicer job or a successful appeal of your termination.

Nick,

I hope your lawyer(s) shut this outfit down. I believe your diatribe about incompetent management has reached epidemic proportions in this country. All I have to do is go to work to find evidence.

Very sorry to hear about this, Nick. Keep your chin up, and believe, that "this too shall pass." You'll get through it. All my best.

Nick,
Sorry to hear about your job, especially the way it happened. I've dabbled in HR for many years here in Texas and it's an "at will" state also so yes a company can fire you for any reason-valid or not. Howver, you can certainly go to the labor board or talk to a lawyer to get some advice. I'm over 40 and a Viet Nam vet so lawyers and labor boards love my type when we get fired or layed off with suspect circumstances. Don't know all your circumstances but the fact there wasn't any discussion or warning, etc. gives you some leverage. We'll keep you in our prayers.

My problem there is that I am an average 33 year old white male. Although I do have some evidence of sexual descrimination, lawyers probably won't jump up and down to help me out.

Nick
Sorry to hear about you job. Sounds like you got a raw deal. Keep your head up. It may be hard to see right now, but usually change is good. If your ex boss truly has his head up his a$$, you will be better off in the long run. Your young and you field is brimming with opportunity. Down the road you will look back at this and say it was the best thing that could have happened. Trust me I know what I'm doing. Oops!... sorry that line is taken.
oz

Nick, I am sorry to hear about your job. I absolutely hate people who cannot stand up for their own actions. Those who are always looking for excuses to pass the blame I hold no respect for. I truly hope you have luck finding something soon.

Nick
I've been in your shoes before, and (at least in Tx.) there are a few things a lawyer can do for you. You just have to decide if taking action is worth it to you. In my case, I got busy doing freelance work and decided not to pursue the matter. The company has since gone out of business.
Anyway.... Keep your chin up, change IS almost always a good thing.
You'll be in my prayers.

Nick

Let me know if there is anything I can do for you at my company. If your interested in Principal, there is a lot of IT areas, there should be to support 10,000 plus employees, just in Des Moines.

Let me know what type of job your looking for and I'll check the internal postings, which go out before it reaches the external posting website. Being from the IT community, it really pisses me off when people are shafted like that, sounds like you really have a bone to pick. In my book, HR sucks in most capacities. I know to many people that have gone to HR to discuss problems they may have with a supervisor, and 9 times out of 10, it magically gets back to their boss.

Again, sorry about your bad news, but it can only get batter dude. Let me know if there is anything I can do....

Your Des Moines buddy...Randy

Nick,

Sorry to hear about the current misfortune. Our thoughts go out to you in this tough time.

As others have stated and as you have most likely seen, things usually get better in the long run due to changes like this. They just suck while they are happening.

And we can all certainly agree on the difficulties of incompetant management. I laughed at the previous post about a complaint given to HR getting back to your manager 9 times out of 10. Well my incompetent manager is also now our HR goto person. How's that! Go government work.

Keep you head up and know that something better is waiting for you.

OK. First off, thanks everyone for your supportive words. It seems like things have gotten even more strange . I got a call back from HR late on Friday and the lady thought that I was just asking about benefits, but I really clued her in to there being a bigger problem that the company owes it to itself to investigate. I didn't give her all of the details, but got enough out there to spark interest.

I did get some good advice from some other people that work(ed) for HR departments (unfortunately not around Des Moines where I live). They said to make sure to use key words that HR people are trained to listen for. So, and I was being completely truthful, I used words like "hostile work environment," based off of the true tyrant that my boss was all of the time to people, "descrimination," even though it is pretty weak, I found that of the last 4 people that have been terminated by my boss, 3 (including myself) were men, and we were all terminated imediately without reason, and 1 was a woman that lied on her job application, lied on her resume, lied in her interview, and it took over 9 months of written warnings and meetings before she was fired. That did get the HR person more interested.

I asked for a face-to-face meeting for Monday, and was told "We don't usually do that since there is an HR representative in the termination meeting." I told her that the reason I wanted to meet with HR was because there WAS NOT a HR person at the termination. I also said that the reason I was given, which I had to ask repeatedly for, went like this:
"What exactly did I do?" - me
"If we didn't have the outage this morning, we wouldn't be here." - my old boss

Pretty severe since the system outage (I work in IT) impacted less than 10 regular (not high paid executives) employees for less than 15 minutes, and it would have been even less if the support people that were in the office at the time (it was about an hour before I nromally get there) had been more responsive. It was even proven that other people were directly responsible for the system problem, but since I was the "manager" (even though the primary person that caused the problem doesn't report to me) it was my fault.

Here is what we (myself and a few other people I worked with) think really was the reason. Our IT department had been hit with a rash of system outages lately. My part of that department had about 2 (including the one in question) in the last week, but none for months before that, and other parts of IT have had dozens of outages, so really we were doing pretty good comparitively. Anyway, the CIO said in an executive meeting (which my boss would have been at) that if there were any more server outages, his staff would be in big trouble (keeping this post clean). Well, there was an outage, and my boss saved his butt by putting mine on the chopping block. Pretty typical. He always stole my good ideas as his own, and always blamed us for his mistakes, which of course doesn't help build credibility with others that don't know the "real" Randy (my boss, not SirQuack).

What is even worse is the fact that I had been busting my butt for the last month as we lost probably the best server admin I have ever worked with and I had to do my job and his. Anyway, I was picking up new skills and polishing old ones that I hadn't used to make sure that our department keep running. In fact, other parts of the IT department had told me that they expected projects to be delayed, but were happy when they weren't and that because of my extra efforts things never skipped a beat.

The lawyer also told me that since it was for no fault of my own, that really I was layed off and not fired. He said that this is a big difference. He also said that to him it was a clear cut case for me getting unemployment, which is something like 60% of my salary, so that would be a big help. I know that it will take some time for that to kick in, and I anticipate my employer will fight it, but I should get it. That would be HUGE for my family as at least there will be some money coming in.

So for those of you wondering what I need (for the praying type, or even those that just like to make wishes in wishing wells, I'll take what I can get)...

1) A new job in my field soon.
2) Unemployment money
3) Some sort of compensation from my former employer. I would prefer not to deal with a lawyer, so a severance package agreement, or something would be good.
4) That I don't have to pull out my 401K. I got a late start, and at 33 years old, would hate to have to start over.
5) Upbeat spirits for me and my family. My oldest daughter has been uprooted so much. In fact, with each of my last 4 jobs changes, we've had to move. She is afraid of that again.

Oh, and SirQuack, I have been in IT since graduating college in 1994. Started as a PC tech, moved in to Microsoft and Novell networking, was offered a promotion into management, have been doing hands on networking and staff management since. The last 3.5 years at my latest employer was about 85% staff and project management, and about 15% Windows server related work. My best management skills are working with people and getting them to be productive. I believe in some structured weekly meetings (one on one meetings) but find it more critical to be with the team daily to keep up to the minute on what is going on and how I can help the team to be more successful. I do not micromanage, however, unless a particular person needs the added "attention" to get back on track. My biggest weakness is my company loyalty. I am pro-company when talking to others both inside and outside the company so much, that sometimes it takes preceidence over my own needs.

Whew, was that a good interview answer or what.

OK. Now that wou are all asleep from reading this. Thank you and good night.

Dude, that really, really bites. Best of luck in fighting it.

Getting the "shaft" by 4 straight employers from the age of 22 to 27 caused me to start my own company. 18 Years, 6 companies, 3 partners, and a lot of happy employees later, I say it is the best thing that ever happened to me.

Many small businesses are computer challenged - perhaps there is a biz opportunity there ?

I'd pay someone $500 to get my 5 computers networked properly.... I already have the hardware.

Maybe Craig's right.....!

Geez, I wish I lived in your area. And didn't have a non-compete clause in my contract...

Are you hiring for any Iowa Reps Craigsub Nick and I could bring in huge returns...

We have not made it you Iowa just yet - but as soon as we do, You guys are first in line for an interview ...

Count me in!

I tried my hand at being "self employed" for a while. Thought that I could make a go at computer consulting. After a lot of small time jobs that barely kept food on the table, I went back to corporate America. Too hard to compete against big name outfits that offer consulting teams. If you don't like what one guy does for you, they'll pull him and give you someone else. With a one man shop, it wasn't too appealing. At least to anyone big enough to pay me enough to make it worth my time. I took just about any job too, and it ended up that I was bringing in about $10 an hour!!! I could work at McDonalds and make more. Of course, it was mainly because I was being paid by the job not by the hour and a lot of small companies say that they want X which should take a day to do, but then when you get in there, they want X still, but forgot to tell you that Y and Z are tied to X and A needs to be upgraded, before B , which feeds data to Z, etc... Small businesses just don't know what is going on with their systems, and most wait until very late in the game to get someone involved, so a project can take a lot more time than it is worth.

Oddly enough, I got a call from Citigroup today. They called me (must have gotten my name from Dice.com or some other job search site) asking if I would be interested in a job change into financial advisement. I asked some key questions: How would someone with no investment experience get trained? Answer, by watching others. How would someone with no experience in the field get clients? Answer, by talking to friends and cold calls. What kind of pay are we looking at? Answer, one guy made $4,000,000 last year, because it is commissions based.

I told him no thanks! No real training, I have to call everyone I know to try to sell them my services, and anyone else is just called as their name appears in the phone book or from a web site lead, and I could make nothing while I'm at it... I don't think so.

Right now my time is better spent searching for a job in my field, or at least for something I have experience or knowledge in.

Oh lord, that sounds like my worst nightmare. Good luck searching.

Was it "Primerica" by the way? They are all over looking for people. As long they don't pay them anything, they can hire as many as they can. Stay away!

Watch out for CitiGroup Nick, I have a friend that left Principal Global Investors to go down to Principal Residential Mortgage 3 months berfore Principal sold the residential division to CitiGroup. He has hated it ever since, and will be coming back to our Commercial Realstate division soon.

I also have another friend that is at an executive level with Citi, and he has told me a few things that would detour me from applying.

You can check Principal's internet posting jobs, not sure there are any IT related though. I know our internal posting website has some various positions in IT, not sure if they are similar to what you did at American Rep. Seems they are mostly IT System Analyst Lead and IT Application Analyst Lead positions. Principal went through and changed all the titles some time ago, if you don't have a IT related degree you get Associate instead of Analyst titles.

Randy