Work history and issues

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I'm writing this with the thought that it may resonate with some of you; some of it makes more sense in light of potentially being an Aspie. Similar stories, questions or opinions are welcome.

I was partway through postgraduate study when I was offered a job. It seemed very interesting, so I took it, and so it proved to be. I learned many, many new things that I could only really learn in that position. It was a systems and network administration job and I had pretty much sole responsibility for a multi-site network with around 3-4000 customers. Since I was technical lead, technical...well, everything, I could do just about anything I wanted as long as my boss could afford any equipment we needed or I could present a quick and solid justification for it. There were elements that I'd never seen before (Cisco routers, switches and dial-up aggregation access servers), but the boss apparently reasoned that I was clever and would pick it up. The pay was reasonable for a graduate though quite low for that skillset and level of responsibility and stress. I later wondered (after many people had basically spelled it out to me) that the boss figured it was a good business decision to hire recent graduates who wouldn't get too uppity that he could pay less than someone with experience, still, I was and am very grateful for the opportunity. Along with this I was, for much of the time, the sole tech support person. While the constant distraction by phone calls was somewhat stressful, having a schedule imposed on me by the random phone calls to some extent helped time management. I did commit the odd faux pas on the phone, such as referring to an outage as a "minor issue", which, from my perspective, it was, in terms of the fix, but was major to the customer (no internet). Although I did get the occasional angry customer, I tended to ignore their emotional response and concentrate on the facts at hand and this approach seemed to be effective in solving the problem, though I wonder now if they would have preferred a different approach. Anyway, after a bit over a year I decided the stress was too great against my perception that I wouldn't learn much more or have much more interesting work to do, so I applied for another job got it.

My next job was similar, but as part of a large team with a much bigger network. It was less stressful in the sense of not being on call constantly and having to bear sole responsibility, and for a while it was fun. There were much bigger and more expensive toys, and technical mentors whose brains I could try and pick. After a while though, it all went sour. The place had a real high school mentality with cliques (especially among those who had been institutionalised there). Some of the processes for doing certain things or the way certain systems worked were utterly ridiculous and appeared to directly contradict management's stated goals, but my suggestions of how to fix them were roundly ignored as I wasn't a veteran there yet (the fact that those veterans had put us in that position in the first place apparently never occurred to them). My team leaders and boss comitted the cardinal Aspie workplace sin: ambiguous and contradictory instructions: following documented process as per directives to follow documented processes earned one a "but it doesn't say not to use common sense!", and substandard performance reviews. as did failing to read the mind of one's project manager, who apparently needed constant communication on project status even though nothing had changed and he hadn't asked for anything. The last item inspired me to refuse to sign a performance review unless I was permitted to attach a response (given an hour to write it I smashed out about 1500 words completely annihilating his ridiculous contention, though I'm sure they were all ignored). My boss decided to employ more genius management techniques like leaving me on the same role for months on end even though we were supposed to be rotated, hoping I would read his mind and "do better" even though processes I was not permitted to do anything about caused it. He and my team leader were confounded by my apparent poor performance despite my scoring at or near the top of the team on professional certification exams. I was alerted to a better job by a friend, applied, and took it.

More to follow...

...unless this is all too boring a monologue and you'd rather I shut up

i was given a poor performance review this spring.
i said i would not sign it as i had a contributing medical condition. work sent me for an evaluation, was diagnosed as aspie.
family doctor was treating me for schizo, the new diagnosis sure changed my life and meds

now, the work doctor says i get to work from home 3 days per week.