Brian's World

Outpost

Just a few minutes ago I gave up washing some TV show about fishing and decided I should brush my teeth and head to bed.  As I stood up I heard what sounded like a gust of wind outside.  Oddly enough, that triggered my “you’re in a tent” feeling, the kind of feeling I would have when I would go out camping with the Boy Scouts in a tent or just sleeping under the stars (readas: the weather was nice and I was too tired to setup a tent).  Perhaps my current living situation isn’t much different from camping out in the wilderness.

Sure, I’m in a significantly larger living space compared to a tent.  I’m not living out of a backpack, nor do I have to sweep out the dirt / pine needles that might get tracked in on a regular basis, but I think if you take away some the details things are actually quite the same.  Camping was always an experience where I’d leave my friends behind for a weekend and for all extensive purposes be off the grid.  I’d go away for a weekend, my friends would presumably continue on doing whatever it was that they planned to do, and I would show up back at school on Monday morning and pretend to be up to speed on things.  See, most of my friends had dropped out of Boy Scouts in Middle School and I never really considered myself close friends with many people in the scout troop.  I didn’t mind being around any of them, but aside from saying “hi” in the hallway I didn’t really hang out or interact with them outside of scouting much.  While I don’t think any of my friends have dropped out of the “go to California plan” (because no such plan has ever existed) it does feel very similar, I’m out here mostly alone (I say mostly because, like in scouts, I did managed to have one or two folks I was friendly with that accompanied me) and most of the folks I’ve been friendly with are back east carrying on life as usual.

An outpost may be a better way to describe my slightly longer term arrangement out here.  I was probably “camping” during the first two weeks while I was living out of my suitcase but now that I’ve got some simple pieces of furniture I’m slightly more invested, not in the financial sense (I mean technically yes, but I don’t really care), but in the physical sense that I have a few items out here now.  I could probably load my existence into a truck in an hour or so if I needed to abandon the outpost and quickly relocate.  My possessions are really limited to things I need to survive without too much discomfort on a day to day basis.  I’ve got a chair to sit in when I want to watch TV, a few small pieces of artwork on the wall so my eyes can focus on something that isn’t a computer screen all day, and just enough lights so it doesn’t have to be dark all the time in here.  For some reason my fairly minimal setup at college really didn’t present this way to me, maybe that’s because I knew the defined start and end dates associated with things and could predefine my engagement as such.

Back in the day cowboys, missionaries, frontiersfolk (gotta be gender neutral), and others that setup outpost would write home to fill in their relatives and loved ones on the latest and greatest news and discoveries.  This feels a bit like my weekly phone call with my parents on Sunday, where my dad lets me know that I’m looking good / healthy and my mom asks what the past week has been like. I don’t usually have anything particularly exciting to say, but I’ve always avoided any status reports that could come off as depressing / negative.  It’s been a while since I’ve read letters home from folks that moved out west early on, but I suspect many of the painted similar pictures either to reinforce optimism, try and encourage others to join them, or even just to not appear to have made what can appear, at times, to be a mistake in the whole process.

Professionally I think I’m also on some sort of frontier as well, at least from the groups I hail from.  Many of my peers find themselves working / living well withing a day’s drive of RPI and probably the same could be true about where they’ve grown up.  I’m out here in “Silicon Valley” which is suppose to embody the bleeding edge of technology and innovation given the companies that call the area home.  I think the wide spread adoption of the internet has greatly reduced this feeling associated with geographic locations; you can just as easily visit a website built out here as I can, but I get to see the billboards recruiting for the latest tech startup or using catchy technology slogans to try and promote products.  Personally I enjoy Microsoft’s “Virtualization alone does not a cloud solution make” billboard.

I don’t know if I look forward to the Sunday drive home from being camping all weekend, when it was thoroughly relaxing to just take a shower and eat some food that I didn’t have to cook, or if I should be looking to a future where I start to scale up this outpost into something a bit more sustainable.  Either way, I’ve already put the fire out for tonight (because if you sleep with a fire still going your tent could catch on fire and you never ever want that to happen) so I should get going to bed.

Good night moon.

Next Steps

I’ve never been a large fan of long term personal planning in life.  At work a few weeks ago they asked me to draft up a “personal development plan” where I would talk about where I wanted to be in N years (where N > 1).  My initial plan just said “doing exciting things”, which is really what my goal is but my manager wanted me to elaborate a bit more on that.  Since I’m still getting a feel for the place, I decided that the best next step was to expand on “doing exciting things” to list some specific things highly scoped given my current position.  Honestly, I don’t know where I want to be in N years and I don’t think a written plan is really going to help me get there.   I think a lot of it is going to depend on what kind of compromises I make along the way.  Ideally I’d be doing exciting things, but I fear I may end up doing things that pay the bills or doing things that people expect me to.  If everything was some sort of perfect harmony people would expect me to be doing exciting stuff that happened to pay the bills, and such work was available for me, but I fear it may be a “choose 1″ kind of situation.

The larger problem is actually because I like things small.  I’ve never been good at planning my personal life years in advance, I get by on a day to day basis using fairly structure routines and I change quite gradually most of the time.  Luckily, for the first twenty-something years of my life this was very easy because a next logical step was always available.  Graduating middle school led directly to going to college.  I finished my BS and an MS was a fairly logical next thing to do.  A PhD seemed like it was a step that I, or my life, wouldn’t be well suited for given the flavor of academia these days so I went out and got a job.  Now what do I do?

If my job was working at McDonalds as a floor mopping technician, I would probably aspire to work a register or cook and someday become a shift leader, manager, etc.  That all of course assumes you really enjoy McDonalds, who doesn’t really.  Unfortunately I’m not mopping floors at my local McDonalds.  I’m 2.5K miles across the country working at a substantially larger company that’s has much higher barriers to entry, I’m also not mopping floors.  I’m not really sure what I want to do next, and that’s really demotivating.

This isn’t just work related though, well maybe it is.  I write code because it’s personally satisfying.  I’m personally satisfied when I see others using / interacting / expanding on something I’ve done.  It makes me almost want to smile when I see someone use something I’ve worked on.  There are also cases, perhaps what I’d consider more academic exercises, in which I program just for myself.  A few days ago at work I came up with what I thought was a really elegant piece of Python code.  No one may ever see it, I might be the only person to use it ever but whatever, it’s cool to me.  Looking back, I’ve done a lot of programming work over the past 5 years or so under the premise that doing this work would lead me to getting a good job.  I don’t doubt that it may be a strongly correlating factor in the past, but I have trouble linking this continued external work with an increased potentials for professional opportunity.

I’m intentionally dodging the broader subject debating the merits of most things I do in life that I’ve convinced myself bolster professional opportunity.  It’s depressing when I think that all those collared shirts were for nothing.

I think a lot of people probably define many of their goals in their social/family space and can look forward to those kind of events.  People save up for vacation or look forward to the weekend relaxing / going out with friends or hanging out with people in general.  Some people look for love, some get married, and then of course there are those who have kids (those are 3  independent events in my mind).  If I were writing Brian’s todo list it probably wouldn’t include many things that look like that.  I don’t have this pressing desire to “unwind” after a “long day” at the “office”.  Going places and doing things has never really been my forte, I’ll occasionally go someplace and do some stuff but rarely because I have a pressing urge to.

Perhaps the best strategy I have is to keep thinking about what’s next so I can figure it out.  I also might be tapping out right now because it’s late and I’m getting tired.  There’s gotta be a fairly reasonable and logical next step I want to work towards, I’ll just have to be careful to balance the time spent thinking with the time spent doing.  Someone famous once said that you can’t always tell if you’re going in the right direction to get somewhere, but you’re certainly not going to get there if you just sit there.

Good night moon.

Looking Glass

I suspected this time of the year would be harder than average for me, that time when everyone goes back to school and gets back in the swing of academic life post summer vacation.  I identify this as personally challenging on two fronts: being an outside and being out of schedule.

For most students, the end of August marks the end of summer vacation.  Sometimes that 2-3 month break is exciting, and other times it’s a very boring experience.  Either way, you probably weren’t in school going through the usual motions.  This is no longer the case now that I’m out of school.  As simple a thought as it sounds, I’m very accustomed to shifting gears every few months from project to project as the seasons changed.  It was predictable, I could look forward to it, and it’s no longer the case.

During my time at RPI I found that I had 4 work cycles: Summer vacation (aka open source broad value RCOS work), fall semester (deploy and build new things for RPI), winter break (experimental things / break from coding), and spring semester (fix all the bugs and make things stable).  Now that I have this 9-5 job (well, technically my critical hours are 8-4, but I usually risk it and delay a bit) that’s no longer the case.  The end of August is coming and there’s no dramatic, or even subtle, shift in my work in the pipeline.  I don’t know if this is what actually bothers me, or it’s the fact that I can’t shift my work if I wanted to.  I mean technically there are these business quarters that are suppose to be important for something, but the only weight they carry to me is on paper.  As far as I know, no one rallies around them because event X is coming up and we’ll all be moving back to campus or something.  They are just dates.

Now that I have left RPI I feel very much like an outsider.  Being on the other side of the country doesn’t help one bit with that feeling either, because my social interactions with relevant parties as nearly non-existent.  I guess I thought work would keep me too busy to notice, but that’s not the case at all.  I whole heartily enjoyed where I was at RPI and what I did.  Professionally: I could hack my way through any academics you could throw at me, but more importantly I had a fair amount of experience and expertise so I could tackle just about any problem thrown at me.  The same side of that coin also made me a resource for others, people would collaborate with me, ask me questions, and generally make me feel of some value.  Socially it took me something like 4.x years to finally start to open up around folks and come off as a nearly friendly (or so I’ve been told) person.

Such is not the case in my new job.  Sure, I feel valuable when I complete units of work but I’m not sure if there is anything that I’ve done that is specific to Brian.  Anything that’s expected of me isn’t specific to me as a person, it could just as easily be passed to someone else on my team.  Perhaps the largest contrast has been from going from the guy who answers questions to being the guy who has to ask really stupid ones.  It’s not a pleasant feeling at all, especially when it’s very easy to to ask really stupid questions to really really smart people.

As I see folks moving back and gearing up for another semester my mind starts launching into projects, ideas, conversations, and input that I, as an alumni, and no longer in any place to give.  Biting my tongue really isn’t fun, but I know it’s part of this process.  That doesn’t mean I like the process at all.  Part of me envies those that have managed to drag it out as much as possible, or found ways to get a taste of it every now and then by staying in touch and visiting.  Not really an option for me.

I hate to extend the ship metaphor, but often I feel as if the ship is leaving port without me this time and I’m stuck on the docks.  I’m left staring at you through some silly looking glass, wondering how much time will pass until we cross paths again.  The optimist in me has a particularly hard time convincing me the probability of that even is high.

Good night moon.