More than a year ago I changed my employer. I worked for one of biggest polish IT companies – Comarch – which employs close to 2000 people and has branches all over the world (including USA, Germany and Middle East). The company is based in Cracow, where it’s leading IT employer, beating big branches like Motorola and IBM in number of employees in the city. For foreigners it’s probably rather anonymous company, but in Poland everyone in IT business heard about Comarch. During my last year in Comarch I was building the team which was developing brand new ERP system for international market dedicated for mid-market companies.
I chose to work for a small company – Wind Telecom – where there are less than 50 of us. The company works for enterprises and carriers delivering different telecommunication solutions (value added systems, contact center solutions). When talking about local employment market it’s rather unknown, not even mentioning national or global scale. Generally I do the same things here – I’m responsible for operations including development, implementations etc.
I should probably say a bit more about what brought me to the change. Not drilling down to all the details it was corporation life. Many small and not so small things which are decided in a crystal tower where a board of executives hide not to be accessible for a plain worker bee. Many small and not so small things, which were developed during years of work and no one can change them. No matter how stupid or annoying they are. No matter how they hamper everyday work (I won’t count them here – it’s a subject for different post). They’re still all over the place. If there’s one such thing you don’t even notice it. If there are few of them, that’s OK – you can find them everywhere. But if you count them in dozens and spend at least half of your workday fighting with them it just drives you crazy, no matter how cool is the remaining (substantial) part of your duties. It’s even harder when you can’t change any single of them. After few failures you come to a simple rule: if you can’t change it – join it. Or change the job, like an appendix to the rule says.
I’m still quite often asked if I’m content with the change. The answer is always the same: “Yep, I have what I wanted to have.” No, the new job isn’t perfect – it has both advantages and disadvantages, but if I’d made a list of annoying things which had driven me to leaving Comarch, none of them I find in Wind. Sure I found out that there’re some new annoying things here, but it was to be expected. I can’t say that number of problems is lower (or higher), they’re just completely different. The main thing however, differs greatly. Now, I’m able to change things. If I find those stupid little things that, if aggregated, can make hell from the workplace I can change most of them.
If you don’t enjoy your job ask yourself if you can improve your current job to be enjoyable. If you can’t do that, and unfortunately it’s often true, ask yourself what you want to do and consider possible options. When thinking about a new job, check if you don’t go out of the frying-pan into the fire. Remember there’s no ideal job and even if there was any the chances would be very low that you’d get one. Even when you think you got everything checked, there’re many things which you’d consider as issues and you have no possibility to know about them.
It’s neither encouragement nor warning to change the job. It’s just my experience. Not only mine, because when I talk with others who have done that I hear similar stories quite often. I have to say that, after all, I’m still happy with my decision.
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