They come and they go

We have had 3 people announce their resignation or retirement in the last 3 days. At that rate, we will have nobody left after 2 months.

One is retiring, one has taken a job with the county, and one has taken a job with LANL. LANL pays nearly twice what we do (I’d say 70% more). The only downside (assuming you don’t mind working for a nuclear weapons lab that is not known for prioritizing it’s environmental staff) is it’s a terrible commute up to the top of a mesa. There is a small town up there, but there is a chronic housing shortage, so you’re going to pay California prices for 1960’s style houses.

Meanwhile, I am hiring a new employee. The pay is discouragingly low, but it’s all we can offer. New Mexico is not a wealthy state and the current administration isn’t that into environmental regulation either.

https://www.governmentjobs.com/careers/newmexico/jobs/2019378/environmental-scientist-and-specialist-operational-nmenv-12090?department[0]=Department%20of%20Environment&sort=PositionTitle%7CAscending&pagetype=jobOpportunitiesJobs

As soon as it closes, I will be very busy scoring applicants and arranging interviews. We have a laborious process (to try to ensure fairness), involving a lot of ranking matrices. When I applied for the management position they wanted a month-by-month detail of every job I ever did, all the way back to my first internship in (cough) 1993. I thought it was crazy, but they needed it to accurately count years of experience for ranking. It turns out I have 24 years and 7 months experience (who knew?!?). I guess I’ll have a big 25 coming up here this year.

Does the fact that I am hiring employees mean I have the manager position for sure? Not quite. I am being treated as the manager for now, but I am still officially “Acting Manager.” They are not promising me anything, and I’m still in my original staff cubicle (I can borrow a manager’s office when I need to have a confidential meeting, like a performance review with an employee). Managers get offices with a door that closes, for that sort of thing. Even if I do get the permanent position I won’t have a window though – I won’t rate high enough for one of those 🙂

I am anxious for them to finally make it official because I am double filling my original position and the manager position, and we are badly understaffed. As soon as I’m officially the manager, I can advertise and fill my original position. There are two more empty positions being transferred to my team, so in all I expect to hire 4 people in the next couple of months; two at the lower “Operational” level (such as the one currently advertising) and two at the higher “Advanced” level (such as the one I was originally hired into). That will more than double my team. At the moment there are only 3 of us!