Here are a couple of amusing facts for you.

Number one is that there is currently a global financial crisis going on. At the moment I am working for an extremely large multinational corporation. Global financial crises hit global corporations globally. ICBM is as far as I am aware (and as far as the higher-level managers tell us) an extremely stable and financially well-managed employer. Contrast with Sun Microsystems, for example, which has been in terrible shape of late. We are experiencing pretty much what we'd expect to experience in the current economic climate. That's one thing. But the other is that the UK region of the company, relative to the other regions of the world and the other countries in the continent of Europe, has been underperforming. Despite everything, revenues have been going up, but profit has been flat. This is bad, because it means costs are going up fast. This is not a "global financial meltdown" thing: other regions are doing great. This is a UK-division-of-ICBM problem. Something's wrong somewhere along the line, and needs to be put right. Because of this shortfall, and despite the fact that the software laboratories in which I work are in certain ways managed from/by the United States, and despite the fact that software produced here is used worldwide, it has been Decreed From On High that nobody working for ICBM in the UK will get a pay raise this year. (I assume that means "this financial year", not "this calendar year".)

Well, this was something of an unhappy revelation. Admittedly, I can't honestly say that I had been looking forward to what I was ready to take as a standard cost-of-living increase, rubbing my hands with glee as though it was Christmas or something. I still don't even know when raises are usually distributed. I am not in debt, I live within my means and I am a simple soul with little need for luxuries. And if I'm honest it is still difficult for me to comprehend that I am worth the amount of money I'm paid for the work that I do. I think about teaching or medicine and I think: those are the difficult jobs, they are the ones who should be paid more. But still. Not great, ahah?

Number two is that ICBM is not stopping, and never will stop, recruiting recent university graduates. Apparently graduate recruitment has indeed been put on hold several times in the past, and the results have always been negative. It is critically important for a growing technology company to continue to take in new talent at the bottom of the ladder so that those people can fill spots higher up the ladder when they become available. To be blunt, stopping recruitment is not going to magically stop people from retiring or moving to other jobs. The bulk of the 2009 intake are set to arrive this September. These new graduates will be starting on a salary which is calculated from the industrial average in order to remain competitive, which for 2009 has turned out to be about 10% more than it was in 2008.

In other words, my fellow graduates and I, despite having a whole year of extra experience, are earning significantly less than the newcomers will be earning when they arrive.

I am a patient and rational man. I understand that these two decisions were clearly made by two different people who may even have been sitting on different continents when they made them. I am inclined to believe what my boss's boss's boss's boss tells us when he says that this was not done by some evil madman to make us feel angry, unappreciated and want to resign; that they can't reduce the new grads' offers without triggering legal proceedings; that this time next year the same mistake won't be made. But I'm totally serious: what's to stop us from just going back and reapplying for our current jobs at the higher wage? "Hi there, I would be great for the ICBM graduate scheme, because I actually have a year's experience on the scheme itself already! I even have an employee badge! I could suggest a role I could fill which is soon to become vacant? My own?" This isn't even a discrepancy that's likely to be resolved by this time next year. Even if business recovers enough, the best they can do is freeze the 2009s' wages and give us a 10% raise, which is incredibly optimistic.

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As for life in the job itself?

The thing about this company and the graduate role in particular is that you're expected to be busy. I have my current job, which involves building up miniature MQ environments, sending and receiving messages as fast as possible for about an hour, and then totting up the statistics afterwards to see whether today's MQ build is an improvement or a degradation from our latest gold release. This was pretty difficult to begin with due to the - charitably - asinine design of the Perl-based performance harness I was using, but since then I have spent almost every waking hour retooling its guts to be 1) comprehensible and hence maintainable and 2) reliable, and life is now much simpler. (I have also, incidentally, completely fallen in love with the Perl programming language. The "unless" keyword alone is worth my right arm.) That job is doable. On top of that I am helping arrange training for the 2009 graduate intake's induction week, to replace the equivalent (much more detailed) courses that the 2008s had when they started, which have been cancelled for obvious financial reasons. This is doubly ironic firstly in light of the facts above but also because I missed all the 2008s' training because I started in December after it had all finished. Quite frankly I would rather like to attend these lectures we're putting together myself because I have had no training at ALL. Which is even more depressing because the training was one of the main reasons I applied. Still, that's busy too. Then I have a cool, strange web spider project which is independent of anything else I'm working on, and any number of incidental little half-hour meetings with bosses and such and such. All of these are things I can do, but I am the kind of geek whose train of thought takes time to start up. It's a sizeable mental gearshift for me to sit down get started on a big piece of work. Little pop-up reminders every half hour sap energy from me even before the events themselves arrive.

Oh and beyond all of that, we're one of the few companies whose employees are unlucky enough to be inflicted with the clunky Lotus Symphony (instead of MS Office) and Lotus Notes, a truly mind-boggling piece of software which features baffling interface decisions and non-standard vocabulary at every level, and dozens of different options screens all full of ridiculous options which make no sense. What kind of brain must it take to make Simple Mail Transfer Protocol so complicated and yet still not allow e.g. in-line email address lookup?

I'm doing fine. On the whole it's not a bad job. But... the only fair way to put it is, I've had better.