In my last blog, I mentioned my frustration at getting my company's ownership to hire additional staff that I think we need, particularly this really, REALLY hot boy (we'll just call him "Ben" for now) that I interviewed at the end of August. Anyway, things have been happening very fast over the past few days, much to the surprise of our management team. We've realized that we have to let an employee go (which is going to be very difficult -- she's been with the company for 6 years and everyone really likes her -- but, her skill set just doesn't match up with where we are heading now) ... so, I've been given the green light to go ahead and hire Ben. I'll be making an offer to him today.

Since becoming a manager, this will be the first hiring and firing that I've done. It's also going to be a bit of a tumultuous 4th Quarter of the year, as we'll also be completely re-organizing our staff, in addition to the personnel changes. So, I expect it to be a very busy next few months. We're not really sure how several of the other employees are going to react to the release (we'll have a buffer of about a month of overlap, so that will give us some much needed transition time), so managing their expectations and reactions is going to be rough. We also might be letting our IT guy go in favor of hiring a third-party company to manage our entire network and IT development. That is going to be a challenge to manage as well, plus our IT guy is well-liked by most of the staff. Two releases in such a short period of time, plus all of the other major re-organization, is going to cause a lot of waves.

Needless to say, I didn't get much sleep last night. It's never a pleasant thing to have to release someone, especially someone you like. I think it is the best decision for the company, though, so it has to be done.

Anyway, Chapter 6 of WISYA is almost done. I'm going to try and have it ready for Sharon to review by the end of the weekend.