A Case of Stolen Identity

Not to be confused with "stolen identity" in the more literal identity theft use of hte phrase, but rather the stolen identity that is my job description. Allow me to tell you the quick little story:

I was hired by my current DC employer to continue to do e-learning along with some drupal work. I couldn't have been more excited.

Once I arrived, it appeared that there was nothing to work on. Most of the projects went on hold.

A couple of days later my boss sat me down to cast his vision where I would not be writing much code but rather I would be working on networking and setting up servers for project management and showing them how to use that equipment (snore... but maybe this is just to fill in the down time.)

Then the VP in this part of the company dropped by my office and asked if I did any "Classic ASP" to which I replied, "Sure. But nobody has done serious ASP development in... what... 5 years, 10 years?" Ends up there are elements of the government that still have Classic ASP (not .NET) sites running and those projects need to get updated.

Jump to week 2 with 107 hours under my belt (do the math... in a reasonable world that number should be under 80 for less than 2 weeks) and realize that I am still on this project and working with no end in site in Classic ASP.

Now, today, I am back in the original (new) office entering all of my time. My new boss greets me like it is my first day ("Hi! Welcome to our company!" ... this is supposed to be humor as if to say "Who are you again? You are never here." ... but that isn't my choice either.) He sits down with me and starts to chat about stuff he wants me to work on soon (more server stuff, no Flash stuff, more LMS stuff.) In walks the VP that put me over to that Classic ASP project in the other location. This turns into a discussion / argument where my boss is wanted to get me back in the office to focus on building new servers while the VP wants me working on the Classic ASP stuff so that the contract client wants to hire us for more work going forward. Yikes!

My boss says, "Well, I would like to get him back here and working on the stuff that we hired him to do."

Enter: the issue of identity theft. He wants to get me back there to work on stuff "that we hired him to do" yet, none of the stuff he wants me to do has anything to do with the stuff that was discussed with me when I was interviewed. My professional identity has been completely hijacked!

What are the lessons for me, from this:

1. Don't leave skills in your resume that you don't want to do.
2. If you are being hired to do a certain job, ask the obvious questions, like...
   "So, I can expect to actually do 'multimedia development' right?"
   
3. If your new employer completely switches your job title on you, then do market research and be sure they are paying you appropriately for the new responsibilities.

These are my lessons.