10 Warning Signs Your IT Career Is in Trouble

Your nickname among the terrified and brow-beaten user community: “Last Resort,” because no employee ever wants to call you for help at what they call the IT “hurt” desk.

Your upcoming performance review looks so terrible that the HR administrator has asked Tim and Gene (the company’s “friendly” security guards) to “sit in” on the meeting, “you know, just in case.”

They took away your blazing-fast Dell PC, three HD monitors, VoIP phone and gray walls of your cubicle. Your new tech setup: What appears to be a late-model Tandy 1000 residing on a faux-wood desk in the old janitor’s closet.

Your tech skills are so out of date, younger IT staffers refer to you as “Barney the Dinosaur” or “Captain COBOL.”

You’re racking your brain as to why you were pulled off that strategic BI implementation and put on this special assignment: “Corporate Research Project: The Market for Our Ice-Cube Product in Antarctica.”

The digital “paper trail” that’s noting your whereabouts and documenting your every interaction with superiors is so voluminous that it requires its own server.

You walk into the room of the big “CRM Kickoff” team meeting between IT and the business side, and the VP of marketing groans and then sarcastically says, “Great, we get ‘Dr. No’ for this one. Good luck getting the software we actually want, guys!”

All your extra work on pumping up your “personal brand” on social media sites has, unfortunately, created an undesirable FAIL for the rest of the company: Twitter, Facebook and most every other social-media website have been added to the corporate “blocked” list, due to the “overzealous use of the websites by one company employee.” Thanks, pal.

The location of your new “globe-trotting” IT assignment, destined to put valuable multi-national experience on your resume? Afghanistan. “Have a safe flight!”

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