I have had the pleasure of working in the tech field for the last 10 years. I can personally attest that it has been quite a ride. I’ve worked in different environments, networks, agencies, and organizations. Each setting has its unique challenges, learning experiences, and networking opportunities, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that within each of these places, I entered the room with a target on my back.

I started my career in the tech industry back when it wasn’t cool or popular and when it was still a predominately male-oriented field. I never anticipated being where I am now in this field, as I initially never intended to join it in this capacity. I went to a criminal justice school and I was hell-bent on working in the legal system. Whether as a paralegal, a district attorney, even a judge if my ambitions allowed.

Sadly when Wallstreet crashed in 2008, I lost the job that I was using to help me pay for my college expenses and when I couldn’t land another one, I had to drop out of school. I spent the next year and a half looking for employment, so I could go back. Every job I landed, I was fired a month later under the guise of the “economy being bad” and the recession that followed it. After a while I became desperate.

While continuing to look for work I applied all over New York City and for everything I could find. While interviewing I got involved with an ambiguous and vague opportunity with a “management” company called W.G Management. I didn’t realize how sketchy they were until I got involved with them. Although I can only go into more detail about it here.

Admittedly, it was the lowest point of my life, I learned a lot from that experience. After leaving that behind I went into Job Corps and took up two trades. One in business and the other in tech. I enjoyed my time while in those trades; met a lot of great people, from different parts of the country, some I still talk to today. They also taught me how to network within their organization, to open up more doors for myself. I am forever grateful to them for that.

My first Tech job was at ASI systems integration. This was the McDonald’s of tech jobs. We did hardware repair field work, for the schools under the DOE jurisdiction in New York City. I never liked that Job. I don’t like working outside while traversing multiple areas in a day. I took the position as I had zero experience and from all the places I applied to, they were the ones that hired me. Since I needed experience and had to get my foot in the door, I decided to take a chance on them.

The work wasn’t hard at first, though unpleasant walking from site to site to fix hardware issues, I grew tired of time constraints that became overwhelming once I had instances of me being stuck at one site while needing to be on my way to another. By the third month, I was over it. The work became mundane and stressful simultaneously as I became overwhelmed with dealing with parts being back-ordered, arriving D.O.A (Dead-on- arrival), not fixing the issue, having to order a new part, and returning to the same site. Having to juggle when to return to that site while visiting new ones, and the scheduling, swapping sites with other techs, I was over it.

Add to that, I was sexually harassed by my manager while at the office one summer evening. It was 6 pm and I was heading out in half an hour while he made small talk with me, it devolved from talking about movies to him propositioning me. He spoke in metaphors and when I figured out what he was getting at, he quickly denied it. But then left the “door open” for me in case I was open to it. I immediately left the room and told my colleagues and my boyfriend at the time. I was afraid to report him as it was my first job, it was extremely hard to get a full-time stable job in NYC and I knew it would be his word against mine.

Luckily for me, I wasn’t uncomfortable for long as two weeks later it was discovered that this man was already cheating on his wife with another woman colleague and this was discovered when he got into an argument with one of the dispatchers, in front of their team. That woman exposed that “secret” in front of everyone. Someone in the crowd knew his wife and told her. His wife promptly went down to the office and spoke to his boss and demanded that something be done about it. She was only able to pull that string because both parties are college alumni friends.

The day that happened, I walked into the office it looked like a hurricane blew through it. Last I heard about him, he was fired and he took a tech job in Maine. Oh well. I left that job shortly afterward and started working as a contractor for a hospital. I was reluctant to take that job at first as I wanted something full-time and permanent, but when none of the other places I applied to accepted me; I took a chance. Although it wasn’t ideal, it was better than where I was.

While working on the contract at Montefiore, I enjoyed the change of pace as I was now reporting to one site for the day. Although the project had us visiting different hospital sites and outpatient clinics; wherever I went in the morning I was there for the day. I enjoyed doing deskside and software support for the hospital staff and I felt a sense of accomplishment as everything I did affect patient care. We were busy most days so my time went by fast. I was only uncomfortable sitting on the nurses’ floor and doctor’s office, as I often felt I was getting in their way while trying to do my job.

All was well until the migration from Windows XP to Windows 7 was underway. I learned here that during every operating system upgrade project, schools and hospitals are the last ones to covert over. While I find that despicable as both sectors deal with the most vulnerable members of society; it helped ease my fears about this only being a contract position. I rotated between working morning, evening, and overnight shifts as the project required us to do a pre-check survey of all of the machines still on Windows XP. Then pre-stage the machines for imaging to windows 7 and the final stage “morning after” support where techs would help the user’s work on the new OS and\or accompanying system.

It became hectic when we had conflicting and constantly changing schedules, while project managers and the client contacts were scrambling for some stability. It came to a head when one night I stayed at a site overnight, imaging a machine for 24 hours straight. There were many issues we had to contend with, ranging from loss of network connectivity to a power outage. The overtime I and my colleagues claimed for that night as well as the months prior as this contract became overwhelming, prompted drastic changes.

This resulted in me being placed on the “morning after” deskside support team. This was the best thing that happened for me as this role helped my career the most. I now had a stable schedule and I didn’t have to wear so many hats. I was happiest in this position as I was working in the role I wanted, in this field. I appreciated the experience I had with hardware repair; it came in handy on some occasions, once I realized software support was valued more I left hardware behind.

I was then promoted to a supervisory position, in charge of the scheduling of the support side techs, locations for the following day. I was stoked as I was excited to help makes life easier for other techs in any way that I can. Up to this point, we still had crazy schedules and didn’t know where we were going, until the morning of, as the schedules changed constantly. That excitement was short-lived as I was inundated with support tickets ranging from basic fixes to issues that required several teams’ involvement.

I would close 20 tickets a day and have 200 more appear in the queue the following day. I almost wished that I was back on the field with the techs who I scheduled their sites the night before. That was the easiest part of my job. I spent 10 to 12 hour days working nonstop in the office. I’d get there at 8:30 am in the morning and leave after 9 at night, a few times around 10 pm. I was exhausted. They gave me one assistant, who became overwhelmed as well. While I had to get used to delegating things to him, now we were both behind.

My day was spent taking and making calls to techs, my boss, and the client. While I was efficient with solving the tech tickets I took on, my progress was often stymied once I was pulled into last-minute meetings and conference calls to give updates and listen to other people argue about the progress of the project. I grew increasingly frustrated when the conference calls became in-person meetings and I was dragged away from my desk where I could no longer multi-task. To make matters worse I wasn’t allowed to speak in said meetings; even when I had a question. I was angry because I never got the opportunity to effect any change.

Everything came to a head when the contract was “lost”. In the tech world that means the project has been halted and everyone is fired, immediately. While caught off guard, I wasn’t completely blindsided, as the week before my boss was in the office with me and he took a phone call that by his response put me on high alert. I inquired about it and he assured me I had nothing to worry about. The very next Monday we were all let go. My worst fear had come true.

Back on the job market, I landed a helpdesk job at an advertising agency, Young and Rubicam. I loved working there as the atmosphere was fun, laidback, and easy-going. That was my first time learning how to support multiple agencies at once. It was a first for me since I was always used to focusing on one client at a time. The work was simpler as all I had to do was stay on the phone and resolve things remotely. Whatever I couldn’t resolve I had to pass the call on to someone else. I got bored with only taking calls while growing increasingly exasperated with the callers who refused to work with me as they only wanted someone to go to their desk. Even more so those callers who no matter how simple you put everything into layman’s terms, still weren’t cooperating.

I had my first mochaccino at the cafeteria and it quickly became my staple morning joe. As I was settling into that place, The age-old adversary of the tech field “budget cuts” reared its ugly head again. As a result of this, I and a good portion of the helpdesk team was laid off again. The layoffs happened in stages. I saw the team leave in stages, everyone from managers to the seasoned tech team, disappear. My turn came in October and I was on the market again. I almost gave up.

I got hired at another hospital through the help of a staffing agency. It was another helpdesk position at Bellevue hospital in the Coopertown area of manhattan. Health and hospitals were the client network; I was happy to get interviewed and accepted quickly, the recruiter did warn me that this client was a “people-mill”. A churn and burn facility that had an abnormally high turnover rate. I inquired on how that was possible, and they professionally told me, that although the client is the cause of it, money talks. I took the job with that understanding while doing the best I can.

I went through training and was put on the helpdesk floor in record time and worked while asking whatever questions I could to be better at my job. The tech department had five managers and three of the five acted like the mob. One was a trainer, the other was the kingpin swing vote and the third one was obnoxious with a chip on their shoulder. The remaining two were the only human ones. I still speak to one of them currently. Unfortunately, they were outnumbered when it came to making joint decisions and often weren’t even informed of what happened until after everything is done. The mob was responsible for the people mill.

I found this out as there was a ticket that came into my queue from a Brooklyn hospital was assigned to me. The knowledge base we had to fix that issue, didn’t apply to that particular hospital. When I rose awareness to this, the obnoxious member of the mob responded and proceeded to berate me about following the knowledgebase, I showed her how it didn’t apply in that case, thus justifying my actions. After two senior techs messaged me and they saw that I was correct, they took the ticket and apologized to me. I proceeded to ask them how to fix it and no one responded.

I got an early morning call two days later asking me not to go back to the client site. I was already on the train, heading there, so I went to the building, grabbed my sweater, and left. I went to the staffing agency for a debriefing and they told me that they fought for me to stay, as the client was giving positive feedback about me, every week, and then suddenly the day after their weekly meeting they “changed” their mind. When the staffing agency inquired into what went wrong, the client threatened to pull their finances from them.

No longer caring, I asked for their assistance with being placed at another Jobsite, since they confirmed I was not at fault for this one. The recruiter told me she couldn’t help as they had to fire me from the staffing agency. Although she was disappointed as she didn’t feel it was fair. I was heartbroken. The only saving grace there was one of the managers that weren’t a part of the mob at the last site, who offered to be a reference for me as I applied around since he had no idea I was let go. But he wasn’t surprised either given how his colleagues operate.

I was contacted by another staffing agency and they helped place me in my first tech position at a law firm. It seemed like everything came full circle for me then as it was a nod to my early college years at a criminal justice school. It was a temporary contract for six months, I took it as I could like for another job while there. I assisted in an office move as well as the resulting deskside support once the desks are set up. I was on a team with three other contractors and while three out of the four of us worked seamlessly; I was the only one who finished the full six-month term. As is typical of the corporate environment, money talks. Despite the contract being agreed upon for a certain amount of time, companies will pay for whatever loopholes they can use to not uphold their end of the bargain of that contract. I’ve become accustomed to seeing that firsthand.

Since I kept a good rapport with the employees there, they placed me on a project that they weren’t able to complete efficiently as they were bogged down with other things. I still thank her to this day for that. She singlehandedly helped me stay there long enough until I moved on to another opportunity. I am currently working in another Advertising agency in a deskside support role and it’s been the most fruitful opportunity for me. I help multiple people a day from different agencies and I support everything from hardware and software repair to network and server permissions access.

My days are challenging but much more rewarding. I get a great feeling of accomplishment when I ease someone’s anxiety by resolving their issues and explaining to them what went wrong while instructing them on how to prevent that issue from returning. While this opportunity started out as a long-term contract, I was brought on as a permanent employee when the original company lost their contract with the client, but the people there fought for me to stay. when the new company took over they brought me and several other techs who were in good standing, as permanent employees.

While ecstatic to finally be out of the contractor tech turnover people mill hamster wheel; I could help but notice that this didn’t happen for me until I left NYC to work in New Jersey. I’ve seen more stable tech jobs and employers more willing to bring on someone on a full-time basis. Not to say you can’t find the same elsewhere but from my experience in NYC, it’s extremely difficult. I realized that making a good first and consistent impression and networking efficiently will help you recover from the volatility of the tech hiring market if it doesn’t insulate you from its effects of it completely.

While I encourage any and everyone to get into a tech career as the possibilities for advancement are limitless here. Please beware that this industry favors the persistent, the relentless, and the resourceful. While the rewards are plentiful, it is not for the intolerant.