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“The company I work for was bought out by another company. Our company was the same size as the company that bought us. I work in a sector of the company that was bought out, and we are considered System Admins, both for Windows and Unix. There are five of us that provide admin services for approximately 180 servers. We do a lot more than just ‘Data Center’ services for these servers.

We were finally told that we were going to have to interview for our jobs with the new company. We did that and also had a meeting with them explaining what all the servers did and how critical they were to the business (i.e., could it bring a line in the plant down if it went down). They indicated to us that we would find out about our positions sometime that month. We just found out that this has been postponed.

I guess is what I am asking is if you have an issue like this (which is we will either continue to work with the new company in Core IT; work for ACS; be asked to continue to work until the integration is completed; or be laid off with a severance) and you have a job offer, what do you do? Is this common in the big corporate world to put off letting workers know if they will have a job or not?”

Anyone have any experience with this sort of situation?

Got a career scenario of your own? E-mail it to us here. We’ll post it anonymously, and see what kind of feedback your peers have to offer.

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I know that it’s standard in the news biz to prepare obituaries for well-known people in advance and add details once the death actually occurs. This cuts down on errors made in a last-minute rush. It’s a borderline creepy practice, but I guess I can see the need.

But I wonder how Steve Jobs felt last week when his obituary rolled off the newswire? Yep, somebody at the Bloomberg financial newswire pushed some button or clicked some text box prematurely, and the obit hit the streets. It was pulled almost immediately, but you can see its contents in this article from gawker.com.

One really strange aspect of the report are the accompanying reporting notes – a list of people to call in the event of Jobs’ death, which includes his ex-girlfriend Heidi Roizen and California attorney general Jerry Brown.

The obit reads like a macabre resume. Because Jobs is such a public figure due to his Apple career, that’s the main focus of the obit. It talks about his meteoric rise and some of the unusual behaviors that marked that rise, such as his sometimes being mercurial and screaming at his employees.

I wonder if Jobs himself sees his life in terms of career milestones and, if not, what the experience of reading his own obituary must have been like.

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Good news from the latest IT hiring and skills report from Robert Half Technology — the IT job outlook may not be in a huge growth mode, but it isn’t losing ground either.

According to Larry Dignan’s blog on ZDNet, 11 percent of CIOs plan to add IT workers in the fourth quarter, three percent plan cuts, and help desk and technical support are the hot categories as customer and user support trumps projects focused on growth, and

“25 percent of the 1,400 CIOs surveyed said customer services and/or user support was the primary reason they were hiring IT staff.”

For a look at which IT jobs are hot, which skills are in demand, and what industry hiring projections look like, take a look at Larry’s blog.

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John Sheesley writes in the Decision Central blog that before you make the decision to follow a higher salary to another city, you may want to get down to the nitty-gritty of the cost of living there:

“Let’s say you’re a network administrator in Louisville, Kentucky, making $50,000 a year and you’re offered a job for $85,000 in San Francisco, California. Sounds like a pretty good deal, right? Not necessarily.”

He recommends using BankRate.com’s cost of living comparison calculator to figure just how much the cost of living will affect what appears to be a higher salary:

“In it, you enter the amount of money you’re making in one city, and it returns the cost comparison to dozens of other cities across the United States. It will show you how much money you need to make in a new city to break even with what you’re making where you are now.”

Click here for more details on the calculator and how to use it.

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This week’s What should I do? entry comes from a TechRepublic member who is feeling a little insecure about his technical skills. He knows the basics of the technology his company uses but doesn’t really feel he knows it front to back because it’s rare that the systems experience problems. Here’s his story:

“I came upon my first IT job 11 years ago with very limited computer experience (didn’t own a computer). I learned the hard way, doing tech support at an outsource company for a well-known modem manufacturer, doing installations/configurations over the phone. I eventually learned the basics of PCs and then some (learned how to build one) and became a team lead of a group of techs. After a year, I left the company to pursue a career with a more stable company. I found myself in tech support again, as that was the only experience I had. This time, I was supporting end-user client software that downloaded data via a direct modem connection. I eventually ended up as a senior help desk technician. After four years of what I felt was spinning my wheels and not learning anything, I left to work for my present employer, a community bank.

I started out in the online banking area, doing pretty much what I did at my last job (client software support). After two years, I then made a lateral move to the networking department, which was something that always interested me. Shortly after being in a position where I just slapped Windows 2000 images on PCs across the company, I was nominated to be the e-mail admin after ours quit unexpectedly, and I was the only one to which she’d showed something about the system.

I was given the label of e-mail admin for a system that no one wants to learn (it’s not Exchange), but was and still am expected to be on-call for other facets of the network, just like any other admin in our department. I have not been to any formal training for our e-mail system. They signed me up for one a couple years ago without consulting me, and it ended up being more of a sales pitch for the latest release of the e-mail system.

To make this already long story, a little shorter… I still feel like I don’t know the e-mail system like I should (I find myself looking online for solutions) and have a blank stare on my face when the topic of ports, mx records, dns, etc., comes up. Granted, I know the basics, but I am used to knowing my stuff (like at my last two jobs), and feel like I don’t know it here. I don’t know if it’s the way I approach this stuff, but I actually read the thick e-mail administration book from beginning to end when I was first appointed the email god. Maybe I don’t feel I know it that well because it’s rare when we have e-mail problems? Maybe since it’s so stable, I don’t get the experience I need? The same thing happens in other areas. I learn the basics of a system, but don’t know it when problems happen.

Any suggestions, or tips on how people actually sit down to learn these systems would be extremely helpful.”

Got a career scenario of your own? E-mail it to us here. We’ll post it anonymously, and see what kind of feedback your peers have to offer.

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Recently, I wrote about a horrid creature who blamed his brash and abusive workplace behavior on the culture from which he oozed (New York City). He thought that his co-workers (the Department of Education at a university in Kentucky) were complaining about him because they were Southern and just didn’t understand his “ways.”

Although culture differences can play a big role in how people get along, in this case, using that defense was just a crock. He was using it to excuse some really abhorrent behavior.

His delusional machinations aside, I will say that as a Southerner myself (although Kentucky’s classification is up for debate — Southern, Midwestern, East Central), I can imagine that his let’s-get-this-done-now pace was a little off-putting to his colleagues at the university where he was employed. I know how my people can be. I have faced the same type of resistance when I try to assert some of my own genetically unexplainable Type A tendencies. But sooner or later you have to adapt to your surroundings. If you have any self-awareness at all, you figure out that you’re insulting to people (e.g., their eyes bug out, they’re suddenly speechless, there are tears, etc.). If you continue to behave a certain way after you’re aware of how you’re coming across, the fault lies with you.

I know some things are culturally ingrained and are extremely difficult to change. For example, I have worked with three people over the years who all happen to hail from the same large American Midwestern city. All three were perceived among their work peers here in Kentucky, on the whole, as abrasive and insensitive. Is this a coincidence? I don’t really know. Was their bluntness and brashness a product of the faster pace of the area from which they came? Were our perceptions at fault or their methods of communicating? Or maybe a little of both. I do know that they relocated to this city and wanted to make career strides here but their alienating behavior made that difficult.

And before I get blasted in the discussions, I’m not talking about intolerance of different cultures. I’m not advocating total assimilation of cultures into the mainstream. I’m saying that, if you expect a certain result from someone you are dealing with, you have to understand their way of thinking.

I’m also not saying that people in the South are nicer than anywhere else. Frankly, we can be just as mean as the next guy. It’s just that down South, we have a delivery that doesn’t sound mean. You can insult someone until the cows come home, if you combine it with a sweet sounding phrase. For example:

“He’s really a moron, bless his heart.”

“God love her, she couldn’t find her way out of a paper bag.”

OK, all kidding aside, cultural divides exist everywhere, from country to country, from region to region, even from workplace to workplace, but sooner or later you have to take responsibility for how you come across to the people who work around you.

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The U.S. has made great strides against sexism and racism, but ageism seems to have been left to thrive.

I’ve been asking TechRepublic members for career situations that they need help resolving, and I’ve gotten a great response. One fascinating story after another has come to my mailbox. Many of the stories are unique and present interesting challenges, and I will post each of them in the coming weeks every Friday.

However, I have started to see one issue emerge frequently than any others: ageism. I’ve heard from people who are being offered early retirement – which they took as a not-so-subtle way of saying, “We don’t need you anymore, but here’s a going-away present so you don’t sue us.” And I’ve heard from folks who can’t get a new job after that because they’re no longer “marketable.”

Many feel they’re being shown the door to make room for the young people who will bring with them new, cutting-edge skills, since hiring managers seem to believe that an old dog is indeed incapable of learning new tricks. That’s ridiculous. It’s also impractical because, in IT, a shop would have to hire in a new group of people every couple of years to keep pace if they really believe tech knowledge is finite. No one can afford that kind of turnover.

And, apparently, the discrimination doesn’t end at the exit interview. The hunt for a new job is even tougher. More and more older job hunters are being counseled to stay away from chronological resumes because they could inadvertently reveal their age. And heaven forbid you should mention the year you graduated from school!

So, judging from my mail, ageism is alive and well. I’m just not certain why it seems to be manifesting itself at such an alarming rate. Is it because many companies have younger managers who wouldn’t be entirely comfortable supervising someone who is much older? Is there really a cultural stigma associated with older workers that even the law can’t circumvent?

Are you guys seeing more of this kind of attitude? I’d really like to hear from a hiring manager who is uncomfortable hiring an older worker, as well as people who’ve been through a bad work situation that they feel has been due to ageism.

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In a recent blog, I asked Can an employee be too nice? A lot of very nice people defended their propensities in the discussion following that piece. Let’s see what kind of response I get this time when I ask, “How evil does one have to be to get fired?”

The Teflon Dean

The idea for this blog came about when a colleague and I were talking about the recent scandals involving Robert Felner, a former Dean of Education at a local university. The story revealed that this guy was abrasive and abusive toward his colleagues within U of L’s College of Education and Human Development.

According to The Courier-Journal, during his time at the school at least a half-dozen faculty members, using their names, complained about him to the administration. At least four of them alleged in interviews that they had to hire lawyers to fend off harassment from him, including the professor he replaced, interim dean John Welsh.

At one point, he walked into a female colleague’s office, closed the door, got very close to her and then asked, in baby talk, why she never came to see him. When asked about this, Felner said that if he stood too close that was just his “ethnic, urban upbringing” showing through (he’s Jewish and from the North). Huh?! Northern Jewish men should line up to slap this guy. [I’ll discuss the effect real differences regional cultures make in employee relations in a future blog.]

Pedro Portes, a former professor and chairman of the department of educational and counseling psychology, led a faculty revolt at U of L’s College of Education that culminated in a March 2006 vote of no-confidence against Felner. According to The Courier-Journal:

“During a meeting that Felner attended, faculty members accused him of a litany of charges, including ‘public humiliation of faculty, workplace harassment, retaliation for voicing opinions, little or no governance, decisions that hurt the college, unacceptable and unfair hiring practices’ and ‘denial of support for research to those who differ in opinion.’”

However, the action was seen as largely symbolic and no action was taken against Felner.

I probably don’t have to mention that Felner’s lasting power had something to do with money. He was a master at landing grants and contracts, which totaled more than $40 million during his five years at U of L.

So, finally, we arrive at my point

Here is yet another example of a so-called brilliant employee allowed to be abrasive, alienating, and cruel because he is contributing significantly to the bottom line.

Of course, this is a university that possesses some characteristics that complicate matters, including tenure issues and, apparently, a chronically dysfunctional HR department.

So the question for this blog is: How much attitude should a place of employment take before it scrapes someone like this off the bottom of its shoe?

Have you ever worked with someone who got away with murder because the good he brought to the job outweighed the bad? Maybe that person is you. Do you get away with murder because you offer something the company can’t do without?

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Who knew that IT workers would one day be setting fashion trends? A Wired article talks about how the workplace fashion stuffiness of the past is giving way to casual dress:

“These days, there are fewer distinctions between industries and power levels. Pretty much everyone looks more like they belong in tech support than in a partners’ meeting. That’s because somewhere between His Girl Friday and casual Friday, between black-tie and BlackBerrys, our workforce morphed from Mad Men into marathon men — and the race is not to the sartorial top, but to the bottom of the laundry pile.”

And they offer a name for this fashion phenomenon: tech chic. The article lists several reasons behind the emergence of this trend.

First, tech money brought twentysomethings in hoodies to the head of the conference table in the dot.com era, and it looks like the preference is here to stay.

Second, the article claims there is a new feeling that if you look good, you’re not working hard enough:

“In a world where profits are down, bankruptcies are rampant, and the most entrenched I-bankers are getting the heave-ho, you can’t afford to look as though you spared an extra second thinking about the cut of your Charvet shirt.”

In my heart of hearts, I hope that this new take on office dress has less to do with perceptions than it has to do with the fact that ability comes from the inside, not the outside.

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This week’s What should I do? blog is inspired by those annoying co-workers who cause distress and distractions to everyone within earshot of them. A TechRepublic member writes in about one of his co-workers who is seriously driving him crazy. Because the e-mail was so entertaining, I present it in its entirety:

“I’ve been with this company almost 12 years. I am currently in a situation (for going on 7 months now) where a co-worker has become such a distraction that it has significantly impacted my ability to get work done. I haven’t missed any deadlines yet, but I should be much further ahead on this project than I am.

Myself and others within earshot of this employee can tell you who calls him, and who he calls, at what time the calls occur, day in and day out. We have to listen to him blurt the F’bomb to his mother every day between 11:15 am and 11:30. We can tell you that he eats two apples per day because we have to listen to 20 minutes (each time) of excessively loud crunching, then (the most annoying noise) the sucking sound of him sucking the pieces of apple out from between his teeth. Then sporadically throughout the day, we get to listen to him laughing out loud at some website or email that he obviously finds amusing. This isn’t just a quiet giggle, it’s LOUD laughter. Apparently he isn’t aware of how loud because he is usually wearing headphones as he’s laughing.

Try performing complex job tasks (as I often have to do, as do others who sit around me) when your concentration is constantly being shattered!

Oh yes, as I’m typing this email, I’m reminded of yet another annoyance…whistling! I said WHISTLING! I can’t fathom who in their right mind would think it is ok to sit there and WHISTLE WHILE YOU WORK in an office for crying out loud. I’m sure he must have heard the song ‘Whistle While You Work,’ but IT’S A SONG! They didn’t mean for you to literally whistle while you work, especially in an office setting! Over-the-road truckers, go ahead, whistle while you work, but office workers everywhere, I have a message for all of you: ‘DON’T YOU DARE WHISTLE WHILE YOU WORK!’ It’s annoying!

And I haven’t even mentioned the pointless conversations that we’re inflicted with. Anything from how much he likes chocolate, to explaining to his son (who is ready to graduate high school mind you) how to properly do laundry. Everything from which spin cycle to use to how to properly add the detergent to the washing machine. This kid isn’t mentally handicapped! But yet he is told how to park his SUV at school (next to the curb and by the light pole so that nobody puts a ding in the doors), how fast to drive, how to clean the windshield, and oh yeah, he must call good ol’ dad when he leaves school, when he arrives at Starbucks, explain what he’s getting at Starbucks, call when he leaves Starbucks, and don’t forget to call when you get home. Just yesterday, we had the pleasure of hearing a riveting conversation on black olives.

After about the 3rd month of being annoyed, I really honestly took a step back and looked at myself. I asked myself whether or not I might be being oversensitive, whether or not these activities are truly annoying. ‘Is it just me?’ I asked myself. The answer is to a certain degree, yes. It’s just me and the others who sit around this buffoon who are annoyed. I will say this: I require a work atmosphere that is relatively quiet and without major distractions. Apparently, others who sit around me do as well, as they are just as annoyed as I.

Things were quiet here before this person was moved into the cubicle next to me. More work got done. It was enjoyable to come in, sit down, and do my work. Now, it is a struggle to complete tasks that should not take near the time nor energy to complete. I’ve recently asked to be moved. Of course, my bosses asked why. As annoyed as I am, I really tried not to throw anyone under the bus. I simply told them that my work atmosphere is no longer conducive to getting things done and that my productivity is being affected due to the current seating arrangements. They know what’s going on, as I’ve heard complaints from those who used to sit by this person. Strange too…this person has been with the company somewhere around 20 years. I couldn’t imagine being anywhere near sane after 20 years of this….”

Boy, do we feel your pain! Let’s help this poor guy out and offer some advice for dealing with this co-worker from Hell.

Got a career scenario of your own? E-mail it to us here. We’ll post it anonymously, and see what kind of feedback your peers have to offer.