The Project Manager

Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.

– James Barrie

I had never had anything, to-date, in the realm of work that I could classify as an actual failure.



The commute had become excessive. We had some health problems at home that made this commute difficult. And my own growth was severely limited that I couldn't justify the commute for the sake of myself or my family. So I had begun looking for something closer to home.

A Network Architect position was offered me. Yes, the scale was much smaller, but I would be officially an architect, tasked with designing and deploying for a number of projects. My own meager wishlist of technologies to learn would be met at this new place. There had been a number of other promising positions mentioned before but they were contracts and each in turn fell through, for one reason or another.

I would be a Network Architect.

So it was rather a surprise for me when my first tasks were more project management related. But then, it was a smaller company, and they sold services to multiple clients. I could do the project management.

And then I was requested and then told not to use "network architect" in my email signature. Not a good sign.

My principal duties were project management, leading meetings, interfacing with the customers. Nothing technical. Occasionally I supervised the deployment teams, and for my own sake of learning, I volunteered to make modest configuration changes and do some of the installing myself.

I didn't like the meetings at first. With some of the bigger customers, it took a few months, but then I found I liked those meetings after all.

At the same time, my job hunt had begun in earnest from a bad feeling. This feeling was amplify by an uncomfortable conversation with my boss that, when I mentioned the strangeness of my non-technical positioning I received a terse "are we going to have a problem here?" Of course, the right answer was "no" and to intensify my hunt.

When I submitted my resignation the first response was "I'm not surprised." As I had done before a number of times I offered to stay longer to assuage my guilty conscience that I was leaving work undone. I was deeply grateful that he didn't take me up on it. I wanted out. I found out in this conversation that after my initial and final interview, they had (according to my boss) lost all of the contracts they would have needed a network architect for. They chose not to tell me before I left my current position.

I wrestled with conflicting feelings for a time after this. But all the same, I added to my story that I learned project management, and wasn't half bad at it. I don't want to be a project manager, but I'm am very happy to be an engineer who can manage a project. I landed on my feet, and if it was for only two or three months, the experience was surprisingly worth it.