Well, it finally happened. I grew tired of the instability, the mistrust and the overall sense of dread looming over the office, and decided I no longer had to be an employee of McElroy Advertising. It was a difficult decision. It wasn’t at all that being at work was unbearable. We’d just moved into a new office space downstairs from the other departments: concrete floors, 20 foot ceilings, no cubicles. I had a fast machine with current version software (a struggle to get, but gotten, none the less). I worked with a team comprised of some of the smartest and funniest people I’ve ever shared an office with and I was working with the programming language of my choice. The day-to-day was actually very bearable.

But sometimes, you have to leave the bubble. McElroy had tripled in size in the year I was with them. They grew quickly, and badly. Veteran employees were marginalized and those still employed became worried or polarized or both. We didn’t receive bonuses, our health care was cut. These appeared to be the acts of a company feeling around for a foothold in a place they’ve never been. I think that’s fair, but it also caued a lot of concern in the office, and this concern was never addressed. Instead, fingers were pointed, “efficiency experts” were hired, and blame was placed. Departments were set against one another. The pain of birthing a company-wide process seemed worse than the pain of missing one entirely. Out of fear of angering our one and only client, promises were routinely made that could never, ever be kept. There were even rumors that the company would dissolve it’s Tech Dev department and move exclusively into Strategy and Analytics. It’s happened before.

When I updated my resume on Monster, I was just trying to be prepared. Then the calls started coming in, I found myself considering options. I agreed to go on a single interview, just for practice. One week later I was offered a long term contract position with the Walt Disney Internet Group, at an hourly rate that would equate to nearly a 46% raise. McElroy made a counter offer that was slightly less than I would have accepted for my 12 month raise (to come up only 2 months later). I left angry.

So here I am, at The DIG, sitting at my new desk. This is my second week and I’m starting to settle in. I’ll talk more about the new job and the way they work, but that’s for another post. In the meantime, I’m keeping in touch with my former co-workers, and staying up on the status of the projects that consumed the last year of my life. I’m doing several freelance jobs for several former coworkers and even heading in to McElroy on the weekends to fix bugs. Had things not gone so poorly, I could have seen myself staying with the firm and growing my skills there instead of shopping them around. It’s unfortunate, but it’s what happened. Tune in this August to see the launch of the VeryBestKids.com redesign. Now THAT was a cool project.