I've been waiting to say that for over a year.
For the benefit of the readers out there who don't know me well, I submitted my resignation on Sunday night. It was a long time coming, still it took great courage to walk away from it. Basically, I was no longer content with the way that we were doing business as a company. I could no longer put my faith in their business model, and I think that their idea of splitting time between one customer (who expects 40 hours a week) and all of the others is borderline morally wrong. Not to mention the adverse affects it has on the poor employees who have to face a scheduling nightmare and frequently fend off demands that they just can't meet.
There were aspects of my job that I enjoyed immensely: penetration testing was one of those. Administrating the firewall was fun at first, but the torrent and unstopping flood of request for changes burned me out after a while. It got to the point where I no longer enjoyed being there. I was facing physical aversion from my place of employment - and this is psychologically a bad place to be in...
My resignation letter was due to the straw that broke the camel's back, and mostly thanks to Greg Brooks. He spent a lot of time as the firewall administrator before me, and naturally he had things that he liked to do in particular ways and more or less insisted on everything being done his way. Fine, he was my boss after all, so I went along. Then one day a month or so ago, he moved out of the position as the manager of the network group - so he wasn't my boss anymore, right?? But that didn't stop him from nosing around the firewall. "We should be doing it this way!", "I don't like that"... friendly enough, so I tolerated it, expecting him to move on and start developing the "outside" security business... but that wasn't taking off so he spent his time looking over my shoulder. I don't mind people double checking what I've done at work - honestly, but when they approach this double checking in the way that Greg did, it begins to become bothersome. He wasn't double checking in collaborative spirit - he was flat out looking for things that I wasn't doing his way (i.e. things I was doing "wrong" ). Some mistakes get made here and there, no one is perfect, but this back dodging spirit I can't tolerate, especially when he approaches the situation assuming that he is right all of the time. Then there is that annoying little look of his. His sarcastic little scoff, and his pointy sarcastic remarks. This "isn't professional" to borrow a phrase that TULMEL loves to throw around. Then, Greg's behavior was a drop in the bucket of the long list of reasons why I decided to leave.
Long story shorter, when I woke up for work this morning I was half expecting them to ask me to leave right then.... they waited until 4pm. Par for the course. This just exemplifies why I can't work for them any more - this is the kind of company that they are. Oh you're resigning, we won't have any of that... "Policy" (which just got mandated this afternoon) says that we have to escort you out. I can say openly that I was a security administrator and that I understand why they would do this if they thought I was a threat to them, but I'm not a threat. I hold no malice for them personally or their company, I just can't tolerate working in that environment anymore. It is a bit like moving out of your parents house when you hit that age. You still love your parents on a personal level, you just can't handle the way they run things anymore. Consequently, if I did hold malice toward them ( purely hypothetically speaking ), locking my account and taking away my access would not prevent me from hurting their IT infrastructure and hurting it badly. They have a sea of un-patched workstations (which I have been harping about for more than a year) run by a plethora of "dumb end users". You get the picture. This is why ALL machines need patched and not just servers. Nachi took down the network there and only one server was infected. Why I took a lot of time explaining this in a security expose that I recently wrote for them, and why hopefully they will seriously consider fixing the problem.
That is enough of that, now it is on to brighter days - doing something else altogether different.
Now for something entirely different.
