Everything In Between

There is always a ton of discussion about the business of programming by programmers and project managers alike. Of course, there are always (at least) two sides of this coin: the programmer and the client. For employed developers (such as myself), the client is typically also the employer, and this creates a situation that is extremely treacherous. A similar situation exists for system administrators—I know, I’ve been in that situation, too.

It’s frustrating that people’s lack of understanding about the various computer industries leads to situations that affect so many innocent bystanders. The fact that computer programmers and sysadmins (in the US) are currently considered ineligible for overtime pay because “all they do is implement someone else’s desires”, even though every computer professional knows how much independent thought and judgement is required in their everyday jobs to produce a quality result, is a classic example of this. (How sad is it that we actually have a “classic” example, by the way?)

In a recent post by Greg Jorgensen over at the Typical Programmer blog, Greg cites Joel Spolsky (programmer extraordinaire), as saying that working ’til midnight is a sure-fire way to get software projects to fail. However, while this is certainly sound reasoning as far as I can tell, what’s even more frustrating to me than being made to work long hours is having my desires for learning and skill development brushed off and made less important than the project deadlines.

Joel says that the first thing you can do to destroy the hope of a successful software project is to hire mediocre programmers, instead of the best ones. Greg makes the good point that we were all mediocre programmers once. How did we get better? Greg says,

The best way to use the people on the team and to help them gain experience is to have them work together as much as possible. Even without keyboard sharing it’s better to have programmers mentor and learn from each other than to let each carve out a domain no one else understands.

And indeed, search the job listings on any career search board and you’ll see companies trying to sell themselves to you in exactly that fashion. But once you’re hired, it’s often a very, very different tune. Suddenly your interests in skill development take a back seat to project deadlines, tight schedules, and more work. This is all, of course, understandable to some degree, but as an all-encompassing truism that provides no wiggle room, I can’t tolerate it.

What irritates me even further is that companies and recruiters only seem to seek the already-skilled. I may be fortunate to be on this list for some skills and so am thankfully not living on the street, but I know better than most that I am not a world-class programmer or an exceptional system administrator. Frankly, I think I am a mile wide and an inch deep in most of the things that I know. Thus, it is irritating that this isn’t seen as a skill when, in fact, it is the one thing that has given me the most success: my speciality is being a generalist, and my ability to learn new technologies’s baseline quickly is what’s enabled me to hold so many different kinds of tech jobs.

And why have I held so many different kinds of tech jobs? Because not a single job I’ve ever held has actually encouraged me (except on my own time, as opposed to on the company’s dime) to broaden my skill set. Frankly, broadening my skill set is why I like to work. And having employees who like to work seems like it would be good for business.

So why is skills development only paid lip service by every company I’ve ever worked for?

• This story of air pollution from leaded fuel sources being linked to violent behavior is eerily similar to the Reapers of Joss Whedon’s Serenity.
• GMail gets IMAP (finally!).
• I really am not that all different; I’m just ahead of my time. From the article:
  

  “Young people aren’t choosing computer science majors because they take technology for granted — it’s something to use not something to make a career. “By and large, this generation is very fluent with technology and with a networked world,” according to James Ware, executive producer at The Work Design Collaborative LLC, a Berkeley, Calif., consortium exploring workplace values and the future of the workforce. That future may be in managing technology, which requires skills today’s college students don’t have: writing, critical thinking, hard work and just plain showing up. One of their primary concerns is a flexible schedule and healthy work/life balance.”

  (Emphasis added.)

It’s lunch time and I’m the only one remaining in the training room. Of course, I’m not training, I’m writing a blog entry. Everyone else went out in a group to Korean food. I like Korean food, so had it not been for the ambivalence about whether or not I want to keep this job I think I would have gone with them. However, this morning when I arrived a fellow employee told me how excited he was to have a new motorcycle, but how annoying it is that the insurance rates are so high. I smiled and nodded, completely uninterested and completely not understanding the finer points of motorcycle insurance rates I think he was trying to explain to me.

That’s the problem with this place. I just don’t care. I don’t care about your motorcycle, just as I don’t care about your software. I don’t care about your network, or your IT projects, or your deadlines. I just don’t care.

And why should I? No, really, why should I? Don’t tell me that I should because it’s my job because the question I’m asking you is why should I care about this job. You already know I care about doing a good job. Don’t tell me I should care because you care, because I don’t care about you (same question: why should I?). And don’t tell me I should care because caring about it is more than caring about a job, as I know you truly feel (you’re missing the point again, I am thinking about more than just my job).

Why do you even care the way you do? Don’t worry, that’s a rhetorical question because I already know the answer. It’s the same reason why I cared about my job at Apple; because I felt good about what I was doing. I didn’t care about Apple, the company, I cared about the people I was working with (or some of them, anyway), and I cared about making the lives of my customers better. Apple as a company could live or die and I would really not care one way or another, but if that sweet mother didn’t get her iPod nano fixed and it made her son sad, I would care. I still care more about that boy’s happiness than I do about whether or not we close that several million dollar deal you want to fly me out to that suburb of Seattle to work on.

Do you know why that is? Because I’m not going to see any bit of that million-dollar deal, nor am I going to improve people’s lives because of it, regardless of how hard I work. What’s going to happen is that, if we get that deal closed, some sales person who sold that prospect our software gets a relatively minor commission (his incentive, not mine), the customer increases the efficiency of their IT processes (their incentive, not mine) which is just business-speak for making management feel better about laying people off (the customer’s CEO incentive, the greedy bastard) and never will my action actually have a benefit for this prospect’s customers, who in some altruistic sense I care about in much the same way as that boy and his mother who wanted their iPod fixed.

So why should I work here? Should I keep prostituting my values and my sense of fulfillment just to satisfy my curiosity with high-technology? Obviously not, though that’s what I’ve been doing since I realized I was unhappy here. You don’t want me to do that because it makes me a bad employee, unable to be optimally effective. I don’t want it because it’s making me miserable and makes me feel like I’m wasting a huge part of my life. It would have been easier if I got more of the perks I was expecting (more training and learning opportunities, more personal time, follow-through on promises like having a day off to make up for the holiday I worked, working with people I like, and so on), but seeing as how these don’t seem to be happening I see no reason not to accelerate my alternative plans (of which I have plenty).

So unless you see a possibility for this to change, it’s not a matter of if I’m going to quit but when, and the countdown to a decision ends this Friday at noon.

I should preface this with yet another warning that what follows is the incredibly hysterical ranting of an emotionally stressed person and should probably not be taken as anything other than an expression of the emotions currently running through my head.

Oh my god! This can not be happening to me. I simply can not deal with this.

There has been an ongoing issue at my work about training. After the absolute disaster at the last engagement I was on, I was promised three weeks of training–something I’d been asking for since after I finished my “official” training that I felt didn’t really help me at all because of the unorganized, utterly abysmal experience that was. Then it was two weeks. Then it a little more than one. Then it was just cancelled, and I was next put on an assignment that allowed me to work from home.

This working from home thing was awesome, because it meant two things. First, that I would get the chance to actually use the product I’m supposed to be an expert in supporting as opposed to looking over someone’s shoulder while they use it because they don’t want me touching their computer network due to the company’s security restrictions, which is what was happening at the disaster client. Second, it gave me the chance to work from home (duh), which is honestly not something I really care that much about for any reason other than the fact that it meant I don’t have to dress in ways I don’t feel comfortable and maintain this mask of someone who I’m not for the sake of the business. Admittedly, that is a big deal, but it’s not a dealbreaker, y’know? (I don’t actually have any problems being professional, but there’s a huge difference between being myself professionally and being a certain kind of professional that has to fit into the molds of the B2B corporate American mold. I can be professional, but I will never fit into that mold, not by a long shot.)

The really annoying thing about getting the chance to work from home, however, is that all this opportunity to spend at home is happening while Sara is in freakin’ Australia on the other side of the fucking world! Sara has been gone since january 24^th (and I missed her a ton immediately), the same day I fell awfully ill with the flu for half a week. It’s been an unbelievably long amount of time and the whole experience, for many reasons that I won’t go into here, has been harrowing in ways I wouldn’t have imagined to the point that I’m insanely anxious about simply getting to see her again because the thought fills me with a crazy sort of unimaginable fear. (I feel so stupid for being this scared about it.)

Now she is finally returning, though because of flight delays I don’t know exactly when, and I expected a call from her some time this morning but haven’t yet gotten one and it’s already 2:30 PM, so this whole airline delay thing may very well cut into our weekend plans. I have already booked flights for myself to Maine and for us to come back on Sunday night. I had to juggle my plans around because this next week at work was planned to be a formal Oracle database training intensive, which I have been looking forward to ever since my first day on the job when I learned about these training intensives because one of my bosses told me I had just missed (by a couple of weeks) the week of intensive Python training taught by Mark Lutz, the author of Learning Python, Second Edition. In brief, I cancelled my Monday day off that I would have spent as an additional “welcome back” period with Sara in Maine that I had asked for (and earned because of the fact that I worked the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday) in order to attend this Oracle training–because I wanted to.

Now, I just got an email from another engagement manager (a boss, basically), that they want me to fly out to Washington State so that I can be there on Monday through (probably) Friday. ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!?!?!?! If I am made to go all the way across this fucking country on the first week of Sara’s return (this upcoming week) for a client who has offered me no real idea of what the fuck I’m supposed to do instead of the training everyone else is getting and that I was expecting from everything I was told at my interviews (I literally asked people “Why did you join this company,” and everyone told me because the learning opportunities were immense–which is true, the opportunties are immense and wonderful, but I want some of them too, damnit!), then I am seriously considering simply saying no and quitting my job on the spot. I simply don’t think I’ll be able to handle that, and with all of this turmoil and absolute torture this job is putting me through, I don’t think I’d feel as if it were such a loss (except financially).

I feel like every single fucking thing is going wrong right now. I don’t feel as though I have a damn shred of support (I know I do really, but it’s so far away), an ounce of understanding (again not really true, I have friends who can understand, but I don’t think Sara really can on anything but a cognitive level–not to say she doesn’t have struggles or that her battles are less important or easier than mine, but she does not have these struggles that I have and by that very fact simply may not be able to relate experiencially to what I’m going through), and the worst luck (and please don’t tell me to count my fucking blessings, that is not what I need right now; I know damn well what my blessings are, thank you). What makes it so unbelievably painful is that the whole of my experiences is so much less priviledged than Sara’s, who’s just been on a wonderful vacation for six weeks and is returning to the wonderful feeling of coming home for a weekend ski trip and to her boyfriend who is supposed to be ecstatic to see her. And I am ecstatic to see her again, but I am so stressed out and emotionally high strung right now that I feel as though I wish she isn’t going to have to put up with this from me.

I spoke for hours with my friend who’s staying with me (after her own horrendously painful breakup the week Sara left for Australia) and she told me that I have to start thinking about myself, not worrying about what kind of a burden I’m going to be on Sara. This is smart, and is probably what I should do, but it’s so hard for me to do that when I have this incredibly powerful urge to just focus all my energy on making everything good for Sara. (Why is that such a powerful urge? Oh my god, for many reasons, all of which are valid and many of which are perfectly healthy, but none of which I’m going to go into right now.)

My friend said that I should want to get pampered from Sara for a little while, have her take care of me, be treated to thoughtfulness and compassion and empathy, and that I should let go of all these stresses I keep taking upon myself like worrying about whether or not I’m going to be happy enough for her so she has a good time. Again, this is smart and makes sense; I can’t possibly have a good time or expect Sara to have a good time with me (which is what I want more than anything in the world right now) if I’m going to be obsessing about the question all the time. But I’m really scared.

I’m scared not only about this weekend but the future as well. What’s going to happen if Sara gets accepted to a school far away? Besides the point of fact that means she’ll be leaving New York, it makes me feel like another knife of how differently priveledged Sara and I are is once again thrust into my heart–not by Sara, just by the situation. I would feel much, much, much better about the whole situation where she feels like she wants to go to graduate school for creative writing if I could understand what the real driving force behind that motivation is. I have to know that if she leaves me for school (I evidently have major, major abandonment issues–not surprising considering my childhood with divorced parents and whatnot), she’s doing it for a reason that’s near and dear to her heart.

Not that I think she’d ever do something so big as moving to Australia for graduate school for any other reason than one that’s near and dear to her heart, but it will be easier to take if I can at least understand–not necessarily agree with–her choice of action and why that specific action of going to a graduate school is the right one for her to make, versus something like getting a full-time job and actually getting into the mindset of writing professionally–not just learning about writing–as I know she can do brilliantly. It comes back to the feeling of resentment (and I feel more guilt for having this feeling of resentment in the first place than I ever thought I would ever feel guilty about anything ever (especially since I constantly tell Sara that guilt is not a useful thing to dwell on–we both have our guilt complexes, me from this, and her from being more priviledged in life than I have ever been)) over my being forced by the Fates to fight a hellish battle for every scrap of happiness and capability to follow my dreams that I can get, whereas Sara has the good fortune to prolong her schooling–something she enjoys–and put off the dreadful experience of having a so-called “real” job (it is viscerally disgusting to me that a “real” job is always seen as something you don’t want) and putting up with the rest of the crap of living in the so-called “real” world (again, I want to vomit thinking that the “real” world is so full of strife all the time) for yet another four years (or more, if she goes for a Ph.D. in Writing in Australia).

(As a sidenote, holy shit, that was an insanely convoluted parenthetical paragraph. Also, I don’t actually wish for her to get a job she hates, of course. I would hardly wish this hell on my worst enemy.)

Again, it’s not that I think Sara doesn’t have her own stuff to deal with. But there is simply no arguing the fact that on many scales of measurable priveledge, she got dealt the better hand. She is brilliant, a constant inspiration to me. And she is so amazingly healthy. No other person I have ever met or ever heard of in my entire life, without exaggeration, is so glowing with the unmistakable aura of a uniquely qualified intelligent mind such as hers is and has not gone through a great deal of very measurable pain and suffering as the source for their genius, the likes of which is obvious to everyone who hears about their suffering. That is the case with me. I am very, very smart. I match Sara’s awesome strengths in many ways, such as self-awareness and intelligence, kindness, and skills in our respective interests. But I have so many still-open scars that have gotten me to this point. Her body is enviously relatively unscathed by the harsh realities of life.

I don’t want this whole thing to sound like a self-pity party–because that’s not what this is supposed to be, but I can’t not feel this way right now. I’m working on it, god, I’m really working on it as hard as I can because I don’t want Sara to have to deal with this huge amount of utter shit that’s in me. I miss smiling. I miss being happy enough to just listen to music and hum to myself. I can’t remember the last time I did that.

And of course, I miss Sara. My god, I miss Sara most of all.

Sara just called! Right as I was publishing this entry, Sara called. She had heard my rambling, crying message I left for her and called me back saying that she was sorry for saying that she’d call me this morning because she was thinking in California time, and I’m on New York time, so when she meant morning she meant California’s morning. (D’oh!)

However, also bad news is that because of the airline delays it is looking like she may not be able to get to Maine until 10 AM Saturday morning, which absolutely changes our weekend plans…. I don’t know what else to do about this weekend, my job, or anything right now, except to go through the motions as normal and so I’m just going to wait things out until I can see her and talk to her face to face and actually hold her in my arms again.

I hate working on something without knowing why I’m working on it. I also hate working on something without actually understanding what the desired result is. That’s very, very annoying. It’s also very, very inefficient and ineffective.

These past two weeks at work were prime examples of just such an occurance. The fact that these two weeks were supposed to be the weeks that I was getting additional training just makes this fact even more frustrating. Instead of additional training, which I still feel like I desperately need to be effective at my job (because the particulars of this product are so damn, well, particular), I was tasked with a vague and unexplained assignment.

(The kicker, by the way, is that in addition to the vague assignment, I was also given the task of training a new hire. So let me get this straight. You’re going to cancel my training, and then ask me to train someone. While I apprecaite the vote of absolute confidence, that’s more than a little backwards.)

The problem with vague assignments is that they don’t give me a direction to work in. There is certainly a balance to be struck between micromanaging an employee and giving them no direction. Neither side of the scale is appropriate or helpful. It’s interesting to me, however, because never before in my life have I experienced the “no direction” side of things so often. This assigment takes the cake, even in this job.

I understand now what it means when employers and managers say that they want someone who can “work independently.” What they mean is “we just want to give you some vague idea about what we’re looking for, because honestly we have no idea what it needs to look like and only sort of know what it needs to do, and you should fill in all the details yourself. Oh, and you’d better get it right.” (How the hell should I know what right is if you don’t even know, and I’m doin this for you?) Naturally, this makes a lot of sense and sounds perfect (especially to managers). After all, why shouldn’t employees do this?

Well of course they should. The problem isn’t in the paradigm, it’s in the execution. This paradigm assumes that the employee already knows what the desired result is and how to accomplish it. If this were the case, then the request wouldn’t have seemed vague to begin with. It’s the fact that I don’t know enough about the situation (see infuriating lack of context), the product (see infuriating lack of training), and the requirements (see infuriating lack of clear communication) that make it vague.

Thanks to so many reasons such as the Peter Principle and the nature of managerial work to forego employee’s interests in favor of shareholder’s interests, companies consistently sabotage their own best efforts to be successful. While I am sure that the size of a company is one contributing factor to this sabotage, I think that it misses the point. More to the point is the fact that managers are to blame.

A company that does not strive to “be large and successful” is not going anywhere. But it’s the manager’s fault that such horrendous acts of self-mutilation happen over and over again. Workers need proper training, managers need proper communication skills, and both parties need the wherewithall to understand the basics of teamwork. Frankly, these things are all sorely lacking pretty much everywhere.

Just another of the countless reasons why I know I’ll never be happy in corporate America. The more of this shit that happens, the more convinced I am that I’m here for the experience only. What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger, right? It’s just a question of when the next better opportunity comes along. There’s no point in suffering to gain experience when experience can be gained without suffering.

Just a note before bed:

• Google search ranking for a search on my last name: 9^th
• Google search ranking for a search on my first name: 7^th
• Google search ranking for a search on my nickname: 1^st

Hmm….

For the past two days I have had the unexpected (and much appreciated, especially this week) luxury of being able to work from home. This is not exactly new for me. When I was freelancing, I routinely worked from home and typically for extremely long hours, because I could. What’s novel for me now is that I’m working for someone else, but I’m still at home. This bears some thought.

First of all, how is it that I actually can work from home? Well, networking technology, of course. It’s certainly not a surprise to anyone anymore that the business world looks nothing like what it did twenty, ten, or even five years ago. With telephony on its way to becoming free (ala Skype), video conferencing becoming increasingly prolific, and mobile PDA devices that give people access to email, instant messaging, and web access on the go, we’ve never been more connected.

As a result, there’s no reason, technically, why I can’t work from home, from the office, from a friend’s house, from a coffee shop, or from a boat in the ocean as long as my connection is fast enough. That very fact alone, decoupling the physical location of the workplace from the activity of work itself, was one of the very first motivators that pushed me into technology as a career path.

Being physically where I want to be and feel comfortable is a hugely important part of how productive I feel. The key bit in that phrase is where I want to be; just being mobile isn’t really decoupling the workplace from the work, it’s just working in more than one place. That can be fun (for those, like me, who enjoy travelling), but it’s missing the point.

In the future, as technology continually finds new and more effective and comfortable ways to keep our connections to more of our work available longer and cheaper, more people will begin to realize the benefit of working where they want to. I would even dare to optimistically suggest that this fact alone will increase everyone’s overall productivity by several orders of magnitude because giving people the choice of what environment suits their needs and mood will make people happier, and happier people do better work. This future has always been my goal, and learning about networking and remote management tools early on was a manifestation of this desire. My obsession with mastering complex VNC and SSH tunneling configurations was an early example.

So other than the fact that technology has decoupled the workplace from working (or, gives the possibility of decoupling, anyway, since most of the time I do actually have to go to some physical location in my current job), what other benefits can it bring? In a word, I say specializtion.

In a practical sense, however, what is specialization? We all know the word, and it’s clear that with advancements in technology in all industries more and more specialized sources of this, that, or the other thing have cropped up. Companies who were once manufacturing giants like BMW are now honing in on their differentiators and hammering the marketplace with what they’re best at—marketing cars (not manufacturing them), in BMW’s case. (See Wikinomics for the reference.) At the same time, other firms that are better skilled at the things others are weaker on have come to fill the void, and this is the crux of issues such as outsourcing and globalization.

This move towards honing strengths and farming out weaknesses drives specialization even further. Having each company or individual working in a more collaborative environment better enables the end result to have the best of all possible worlds while at the same time not penalizing (indeed, actually encouraging) specialists to contribute their efforts. But the question still stands: why is this a perk?

Isn’t it bad that specialization is becoming not merely a nice-to-have, but a requirement to keep yourself employed or your business in the black? I don’t think so, and here’s why.

I see this ever-increasing specialization as a positive step for the worker because it means he or she will have to spend less time dealing with uninteresting problems, whatever they are for her. In the past, an entrepeneur had to not only be skilled in his business, but also had to focus strongly on being a vigilant accountant, salesman, and strategist. These things aren’t going away, but the amount of effort and time required to do them right is going way, way down.

Specialized companies that offer extremeley targetted services like Vebio, a web site that let’s freelancers and consultants keep accurate timesheets and invoices, are filling in the gaps. With more of these services cropping up all the time, motivated business people can spend a greater chunk of their energy actually tackling the problems they want to, instead of the ones they have to.

Not only that, but the reverse is true as well. With increasing options to take advantage of specialized services and products, people who will be more versatile and able to adapt quickly and effectively to more specializations will see more work and opportunities coming their way. In effect, being a specialist at specilizing in something will increase your implied odds of success in whatever task you undertake more than ever before. The more able you are to apply specialized skills to a broad range of problems, the more valuable your skill set.

So technology is driving many great things for the every day worker. Even though these perks haven’t touched a large population of the workforce yet, I believe everyone will at least begin to feel them in a few more years. Businesses that don’t adapt will lose employees to opportunities that offer a better work-life balance. Our society will have to adjust to the idea that the 9-5 isn’t as efficient as it once was (and is still often thought to be).

Especially when more folks from my generation join the workplace (I realized recently that I was in some ways unfortunately too damn early to the party), the generation that has been socialized in cyberspace just as much as they have been in meatspace, the very structure of our hierarchical corporate foundations will shift beneath our feet. And you know what, God bless that change.

Warning: Emotional ranting follows. Don’t want to read angsty, angry drivel? Then don’t read further. You have been warned.

Oh my god. What am I doing? This situation just keeps getting worse. I’m amazed, utterly and completely amazed at the childishness of all of this. I have no idea what I’m here for, what I’m doing, what to do. I get forwarded emails with questions to which the answers are behind a single link in the email itself. (Why are you asking questions? You obviously didn’t actually read the email.) I write up huge amounts of detailed information on the situation only to be told I sound like a technical madman guru, and to please compose a Power Point presentation instead. (Technical madman guru? I didn’t even use a single acronym in the whole document, nor did I even talk about computers. I talked solely about the ridiculous interpersonal antics of the people I’m working with. Or not working with, as the case may be, because of said stupid interpersonal antics. And Power Point? Oh, I get it, no full sentences and really big text. Yeah, that does seem to be the norm for some reason.)

No one smiles, everyone talks quietly. Walking over to each other’s cubes has been replaced by email because of the tension. (What sense does it make to send an email to each other when I can hear you breathing not ten feet from me?) I can’t believe this is what the modern workplace is like. I’m so disappointed in our society right now, so angry that people as a collective don’t see this as a major problem, an incredibly unhealthy and dirty thing.

I feel so fed up with all of it, so much like just screaming at the top of my lungs at all these zombies around me. They are so dead, so…plugged into their insignificant activities. I loathe the thought that I even look like any of these people with their bland clothes and black leather shoes, identical haircuts and PDAs and black Dell laptop bags. It feels disgusting, like heavy vomit.

I hate it. And most of all, I hate that I spent the entire day doing “work” and I didn’t learn a damn thing about anything interesting.

Update: In fairness, today was a much better day, though in large part only because I found out I’ll (probably) be scheduled for additional training in the coming weeks. It was supposed to be three additional weeks, then two, but then there’s a holiday, so it’s really one and a half weeks, but that’s better than nothing. I just hope this won’t be like the first time I went to so-called “training.” I want to actually feel like I’m learning something that’ll help me.

Second update: So it turns out training was totally canceled on me, which is not a big surprise, but I did get the opportunity (probably by being pulled off the project I was on) to work from home for a few days, which was absolutely awesome (and educational!) anyway. And today, my first day in three days back in an office, I got to meet the new “boss” guy, who seems nice but, better yet, made an impassioned 10 minute speech about the importance of team building, ongoing training, and knowledge sharing to a successful team. Maybe things’ll get better around here after all. I can hope, can’t I?

I am in a state of iffyness about my job. Or rather, about its environment. I like the computer work a lot. I love having work that involves command lines and requires not only an understanding of advanced computing but also stresses learning new stuff all the time. That part is amazing and I really enjoy it. But I am having a really, really, really hard time with the formal dress and the office environment. I can even get behind the desire to look nice and sharp, and damnit, I think I do look pretty good and sharp in my work clothes, but what’s to make me appear sharp if there’s no freakin’ laid back and everyone’s constantly so uptight about everything?

It is more than foreign. It is alien. It feels a little bit like I’m a bird under water, or a fish out of water, or some such analogy intended to imply an absurdly misplaced object. I don’t feel like an office denizen, and, more disturbing, is the fact that I honestly don’t think I ever want to feel like one either.

I keep trying to make the situation better in small ways like keeping a sense of humor about myself and the work and the situations we find ourselves in — like my Family Feud research notes which fell totally flat — but the most I get out of it is perhaps a guarded smile from the guy at the next cubicle. The office is so amazingly bland. All the furniture is beige and the entire floor is filled with a grid of cubes. The only thing worth looking at all is the New York City skyline out the window. At least my cube is right next to the window. Of course, the desk and computer is situated such that I have to sit with my back to the skyline, an interior design decision I can only imagine was made by some “productivity” company that figured people would be more productive if they didn’t look out the window at the river too often.

So basically I have found the other side of my golden coin. Now I have the salary I want and deserve (though why stop here?), the job is technically demanding and offers tons of opportunity for growth and learning, but the environment is all wrong, in almost every single way. Past jobs were shitty money (especially for my level of expertise), way too easy or too dead-ended, but the environment was better. Why is it so hard to find a balance for these things? I refuse to believe that I am just that hard to please.

And I am having a hugely difficult time pursuing my own projects, too. In the past it was still a challenge, but it was one I enjoyed because I was practicing at it and was ultimately successful, but now I only eek out little things here and there instead of the (relatively) awesome personal accomplishments of the past. It’s because back then I could do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. Now I can only do whatever I want between certain hours of the day, and only if I’m not too tired or actually feeling up for it at the right time.

I used to stay up all night and do personal projects. I can’t do that anymore. I would get all into these projects and they would distract me and keep my occupied. I’d like that, and I’d also like working on the project. But now I can’t schedule things that way anymore because of work. God, I hate having a 9-5 job. I hate it so much sometimes it’s just unreal. It’s so fucking not true what people tell you when you’re little: “You can do whatever you want when you’re grown up.” What a load of crap that is. It should be, “You can do whatever you want on your own time when you’re grown up, but you’ll also sell a large chunk of your time to other people for money.”

I keep telling myself things will get better, but how likely is that really if what I’m really having a problem with is the environment of the place to begin with? If the environment were really awesome at this job then I’d probably feel differently about it. I think. I don’t know. Maybe I wouldn’t and I’d just find something else to complain about. Damnit, then, why can’t I find something to do or make that I enjoy doing and makes me the money I want to live off of the way I want to?

The last week or so at work has been a bit of a rollercoaster. I’ve felt good, then bad, then good again, and then bad again, back and forth in more ways than one. The company is very stressed right now as we are less than two weeks from a brand new acronym I encountered: EOFY (End of Fiscal Year). As part of the effort to improve things, I was first asked to work the Martin Luther King Jr. day holiday, which I (somewhat reluctantly) agreed to do after my boss offered me to “comp” me a day off some other time. However, then I was asked to also work straight through the next weekend. Twelve solid days of work.

I said no. I’m a little worried about that. Fact of the matter is, I’m just not that devoted. I see no real benefit from working more. I don’t earn more money and I’m not exactly having a ball. Frankly, I can’t understand why the people who said yes actually said yes. I did feel the pressure to say yes, and though I still don’t know if I would have done so, the fact that saying yes would have meant that the last time I saw Sara until she returned from Australia would have been tomorrow closed the argument. There was just no way I was going to give up the last weekend I could spend time with her in over a month for…that.

Consolingly, Sara told me I could explain that this situation isn’t typical and so my refusal is a special case. But the more I think about it, the more I don’t want to say that because if I am asked to do many more of those such things, I intend to say no just as often. My job should only be my life if I am doing only what I want to do and nothing else. There’s so little reason in this day and age why people should ever, ever do anything (significant) they don’t genuinely want to that I’m growing increasingly frustrated seeing such pointless things around me and as a part of my life so often.

I love technology and I love learning more about it, solving problems, working on implementing solutions, and documenting them thoroughly. There’s no question I’m better off today than I ever have been before. But it’s not good enough. I’m still doing and putting up with so much of other people’s bullshit that I shouldn’t have to–that nobody should ever have to–that I know I’ve still got a long way to go.

The way I see it, there are only two ways I can ever make doing what I want and only what I want a reality. The first is to work for myself, freelance or start-up company or something. For the several years that I did that, I was actually much happier for a much longer time than I’ve ever been when I worked as an employee of any company, big or small. I think that is because I focused on solely what I wanted to do and deemed worth doing. The only issue was that my income was not steady and ultimately not profitable enough to sustain a living doing the kind of web development I was doing. I’m not going to be an exceptional web developer; there are too many other people out there who are far better at that than I am. I lack the graphic design skills to be a designer and I lack the programming skill to be a one-man developer of anything beyond small projects.

The only other way to ever do only what I want, then, is to join an open source or open source-like organization where I get paid for it. Unfortunately, I am too unskilled and thus unknown for anyone to be that interested in me right now. Hopefully, this will eventually change, and I’ll get better and better and become a uniquely qualified individual for some uniquely specialized task that I enjoy doing. However, there is no doubt in my mind that this will never happen if I work for a company that still functions in the old-model of thinking, closed source and closed minds. It is a requirement that I task myself to ensure that I only receive tasks that I enjoy, and that is only possible in groups when collaboration is voluntary.

I am also not yet over being incredibly bitter and resentful at the world at large and at certain past situations in particular for making this sort of thing a constant battle for me. The majority of my life has been a constant struggle to make others see the most basic, fundamental, obvious things. I resent that most of my memories of growing up are about fighting with parents and teachers about my own well being. I am angry that I have had to parent myself to such a degree that I feel so much older than everyone my own age. I felt like I was 20 at 12, like 30 at 16 and now like 45 at 22. I am tired of fighting.