#5183 - job hunting
no, i didn't get the boot from work. in fact, things have been going pretty awesome at work, but even though the economy is in the dumps i still feel like finding a different job that gives me more of a challenge and less monotony than my current job, and hopefully pays me more too.
see, the reason why i say work has been pretty awesome is because i just realized today that i'm saving the company a boatload of money, where by "boatload" i mean "dinghy-sized amount". $90,000 isn't a lot compared to some things at work, but it's nothing to sneeze at, either. here's how i'm saving that much money:
a few years ago i put together a spreadsheet to help myself do account reworks. basically this thing takes certain inputs (bill cycle dates, dates when changes were requested, price plan details, etc.) and does the calculations by itself. it's great, instead of taking several minutes to find the information and then do the calculations all by hand and possibly get them wrong, this thing takes easy-to-find information as inputs, does all the math, and spits out what the bill should have looked like.
well, i had created this thing as a personal tool to help me, myself and i with my reworks. i never intended for other people to use it for their own reworks because 1) i didn't want to have to teach anybody else how to use it, and 2) i didn't want someone to get a failing score on an audit because they used my calculator incorrectly or it had an error that i didn't catch - because i knew how it worked, i knew how to tell when i was getting crazy results that didn't make sense.
so fast forward a few years and i've sent it to a few people who needed to use it, and they gave it to a few more people, and now it's such that my boss has asked me to make some changes to it so folks can do certain tasks easier with it and so on and so forth. so i make the changes and send it out and now my whole team is using it (9 people), another team that audits us is using it (4 people), and there's 1 person in the quality team who audits both my team and the team that audits my team who's using it too, and folks really like it once they've gotten used to it because it gets rid of a lot of the issues when doing a rework.
so today i was thinking about the number of people using it, and figured "well, what if it normally took someone 5 minutes to do the calculations after finding the details, and this sheet made it so it only took 1 minute instead?", did some math, and figured out that by saving each person 4 minutes per item they process, and if we should be processing about 20 items per day, that's 80 hours in one day for one person. multiply that by 5 days in a week, by 52 weeks, by 14 people using it, and take that number of hours and multiply it by $18 / hour (at least) and you get about $87,000 saved over the course of a year, and that doesn't include the savings from people not making mistakes when calculating rework totals. i sent a message to my boss and copied her boss on it and she was so impressed about it that in exchange for me saving the company about $90,000 a year i got a gift certificate for $25.00 and team recognition. whammywah says that i should use it and buy a t-shirt that says "i saved my company $90,000 and all i got was this lousy t-shirt", bahahahahaha. i haven't decided what i'm going to do with it yet since there's a ton of stores and restaurants and such i can choose to use this with, but knowing me i'll probably just use it for stuff at amazon.com.
but so that part of work is awesome, but the rest of it is dull and boring. same ol' same ol' every day, so i've been keeping my eye out for positions opening at other companies. i saw a position for an information technology specialist with the department of energy open up a week or two ago, and i just finished applying for it a few days ago. i should really call the HR recruiter for that position since the usa jobs site says my application status is unknown, so either the agency's application system doesn't report back to the usa jobs site, or there really was an error when i tried submitting my application and it never arrived. today i got an email from ibm about a job as an "entry level strategy & change senior consultant", which also seems right up my alley, and if the information at glassdoor.com is any indication, it pays much better too.
i've made some updates to glennfitzpatrick.com, posted up a few videos there (they're also at my youtube page, my user name is fitzpatrickglenn but i'm too lazy to make a link there right now. just go to the glenn fitzpatrick times and click on "tv listings" at the top to get there).
i feel like every time i post on here now it's involved me moaning on and on about how i never post on lj anymore. mostly it's because i don't really feel like i've got that much to say nowadays, and if i just post about what i did that day it'd be boring to read. i recently listened to the audiobook of michael palin's "around the world in 80 days" travel diary and that was really good journal writing - it's made me think about how i could write journal entries about daily life better, but at least he was going around the world and doing exciting stuff while mine would sound like "today i went to work. my coworkers kept asking me what to do about how they should use my rework spreadsheet, and even though i don't mind helping, it's a pain in the butt for me to stop what i'm doing every 30 minutes to answer another question about it." i'm also in the middle of reading "on the road" by jack kerouac, and it's hard to get into... i was into it for a while, and now that he's in denver everything is all blending into each other.
plus i'm writing this post in writeroom on the mac, which was once described in a review i read as being just like kerouac's taped scroll of paper he used for writing "on the road" since the current input line is always right in the middle of the screen and all the text i've typed just scrolls off the top of the screen, and the whole bottom half of the screen is blank. i don't know which style i'd use if i did get back into journal writing -- palin's daily-segmented "here is what i did today" writing, always in present tense? or kerouac's rambling more conversational and raw style where everything is always what is happening at that exact moment? either way, i don't know, but i hope i can remember to write in here a bit more often. then again i said the same thing about trying to take pictures every day for fitzpatrickphotos.com, and see how well that worked out for me. :P
maybe in the end it'll be like kerouac, but with paragraph breaks thrown in there.
see, the reason why i say work has been pretty awesome is because i just realized today that i'm saving the company a boatload of money, where by "boatload" i mean "dinghy-sized amount". $90,000 isn't a lot compared to some things at work, but it's nothing to sneeze at, either. here's how i'm saving that much money:
a few years ago i put together a spreadsheet to help myself do account reworks. basically this thing takes certain inputs (bill cycle dates, dates when changes were requested, price plan details, etc.) and does the calculations by itself. it's great, instead of taking several minutes to find the information and then do the calculations all by hand and possibly get them wrong, this thing takes easy-to-find information as inputs, does all the math, and spits out what the bill should have looked like.
well, i had created this thing as a personal tool to help me, myself and i with my reworks. i never intended for other people to use it for their own reworks because 1) i didn't want to have to teach anybody else how to use it, and 2) i didn't want someone to get a failing score on an audit because they used my calculator incorrectly or it had an error that i didn't catch - because i knew how it worked, i knew how to tell when i was getting crazy results that didn't make sense.
so fast forward a few years and i've sent it to a few people who needed to use it, and they gave it to a few more people, and now it's such that my boss has asked me to make some changes to it so folks can do certain tasks easier with it and so on and so forth. so i make the changes and send it out and now my whole team is using it (9 people), another team that audits us is using it (4 people), and there's 1 person in the quality team who audits both my team and the team that audits my team who's using it too, and folks really like it once they've gotten used to it because it gets rid of a lot of the issues when doing a rework.
so today i was thinking about the number of people using it, and figured "well, what if it normally took someone 5 minutes to do the calculations after finding the details, and this sheet made it so it only took 1 minute instead?", did some math, and figured out that by saving each person 4 minutes per item they process, and if we should be processing about 20 items per day, that's 80 hours in one day for one person. multiply that by 5 days in a week, by 52 weeks, by 14 people using it, and take that number of hours and multiply it by $18 / hour (at least) and you get about $87,000 saved over the course of a year, and that doesn't include the savings from people not making mistakes when calculating rework totals. i sent a message to my boss and copied her boss on it and she was so impressed about it that in exchange for me saving the company about $90,000 a year i got a gift certificate for $25.00 and team recognition. whammywah says that i should use it and buy a t-shirt that says "i saved my company $90,000 and all i got was this lousy t-shirt", bahahahahaha. i haven't decided what i'm going to do with it yet since there's a ton of stores and restaurants and such i can choose to use this with, but knowing me i'll probably just use it for stuff at amazon.com.
but so that part of work is awesome, but the rest of it is dull and boring. same ol' same ol' every day, so i've been keeping my eye out for positions opening at other companies. i saw a position for an information technology specialist with the department of energy open up a week or two ago, and i just finished applying for it a few days ago. i should really call the HR recruiter for that position since the usa jobs site says my application status is unknown, so either the agency's application system doesn't report back to the usa jobs site, or there really was an error when i tried submitting my application and it never arrived. today i got an email from ibm about a job as an "entry level strategy & change senior consultant", which also seems right up my alley, and if the information at glassdoor.com is any indication, it pays much better too.
i've made some updates to glennfitzpatrick.com, posted up a few videos there (they're also at my youtube page, my user name is fitzpatrickglenn but i'm too lazy to make a link there right now. just go to the glenn fitzpatrick times and click on "tv listings" at the top to get there).
i feel like every time i post on here now it's involved me moaning on and on about how i never post on lj anymore. mostly it's because i don't really feel like i've got that much to say nowadays, and if i just post about what i did that day it'd be boring to read. i recently listened to the audiobook of michael palin's "around the world in 80 days" travel diary and that was really good journal writing - it's made me think about how i could write journal entries about daily life better, but at least he was going around the world and doing exciting stuff while mine would sound like "today i went to work. my coworkers kept asking me what to do about how they should use my rework spreadsheet, and even though i don't mind helping, it's a pain in the butt for me to stop what i'm doing every 30 minutes to answer another question about it." i'm also in the middle of reading "on the road" by jack kerouac, and it's hard to get into... i was into it for a while, and now that he's in denver everything is all blending into each other.
plus i'm writing this post in writeroom on the mac, which was once described in a review i read as being just like kerouac's taped scroll of paper he used for writing "on the road" since the current input line is always right in the middle of the screen and all the text i've typed just scrolls off the top of the screen, and the whole bottom half of the screen is blank. i don't know which style i'd use if i did get back into journal writing -- palin's daily-segmented "here is what i did today" writing, always in present tense? or kerouac's rambling more conversational and raw style where everything is always what is happening at that exact moment? either way, i don't know, but i hope i can remember to write in here a bit more often. then again i said the same thing about trying to take pictures every day for fitzpatrickphotos.com, and see how well that worked out for me. :P
maybe in the end it'll be like kerouac, but with paragraph breaks thrown in there.