Where I don't care what others think

Next Steps

September 11th, 2011 Posted in Life | 1 Comment »

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.

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Looking Glass

August 24th, 2011 Posted in College, Life, Work | No Comments »

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.

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Setting Sail: A Pirates Life (2/3)

August 9th, 2011 Posted in College | 1 Comment »

This post is part two of the three part series I’m titling ‘A Pirates Life.’

After ye’ early ventures our small crew started to pick up some momentum.  We were aiming to set sail for open water, into uncharted territory in hopes of even greater treasure.  Avast, we couldn’t do it along with such a small crew, so I figured I could help the Captain and Chief Mate out by recruiting some of the drunkards that frequented the tavern.  Sure, they might not be the best sailors in the land, but they seemed to be a hearty bunch of fellows that had an idea what was going on.  I figured instead of outright telling them to join it would be less work for me if they wanted to join on their own, so I posed some quite open ended questions to some quite open minded folks and before you knew it the crew had doubled or tripled in size.  It was surprisingly easy getting people to join the crew by letting them take part in the planning for our venture into uncharted waters.  To be quite frank, we could use any cartographer we could find trying to help chart our course.

Sure, we had our scuffles.  One of note to this day was during one of the initial recruitment sessions (you know, where potential pirates come and right their name in the Crew Log) the Chief Mate argued strongly for a sailor he’d known who was convinced that the knots tied in our Chip Log weren’t measured correctly.  Having tied them myself (and being fairly accurate with my measurement skills) I called his bluff but we let him aboard anyways.  It seemed that having one mutiny-prone fellow would help keep morale from getting too high at times, wouldn’t want the crew to be overly optimistic of anything.  I had to sleep with one eye open from that day on, but paying extra attention to things seemed to work well (and I could live with being a bit tired).

We set sail and made our way from port to port, borrowing what we could and looting what we couldn’t.  Anything we couldn’t use we used to barter (aka sell) at the next port we landed at.  Lucky we had one crew member who could sell just about anything, another one that could fix just about anything, and a few well skilled at putting junk together and making it look like silver.  Turns out that’s all the people really want these days, as long as it looks good and works fine the details and composition of it don’t matter to much at all.

We picked up a few treasure maps along the way and secure some small chests, we were starting to do quite well for ourselves, collection a sizable chest and gathering much needed spices and oils to look to sail to new foreign ports.  Unfortunately, like every great pirate sailing from port to port, the Royal Navy, specially one Rear admiral, seemed to take personal offense to our plunders and plots of conquest.  He set out to shut down ports before we arrived, preventing both us and the “friendly” merchants from doing any business.  Luckily for us, the merchants found other ways to exchanged their goods for our services; turns out they don’t like paying the queen’s tax much either.

This all culminated in a meeting with the Admiral of the Fleet actually, who took us by surprised as we docked in the Port of Tyne to do business.  In retrospect, we should have expected company in the Navy’s backyard.  After putting up a noteworthy fight with the Rear admiral, his commander came in to negotiate peace with us.  I was glad that we were finally meeting face to face to discuss our issues, it’s much harder to sleep with the sound of cannon fire raining in than one might think.  We sharpened our swords and headed to the meet, expecting an ambush of sorts.  Turns out the Admiral of the Fleet is a bit too laissez faire for something like that.  Instead, he conceited that the taxes they were making at the port were never going to balance the destruction we could (and already had!) caused, and we agreed to split our differences and continue on with our voyage.  I suspect the Admiral of the Fleet was loosing faith in his Rear Admiral after he failed to eliminate us several times.  It certainly helped having the tax-dodging merchants on our side too!

Early on as my time as Second Mate, back when we were still recruiting the crew,  the Captain had pulled me aside and said that should he fall to Davy Jones’ Locker I should take the wheel and stand in his place.  Knowing I had large pirate boots that I might need to fill some day I tried to stay as well informed as possible, learning as much as I could from my fellow pirates and practicing the whole navigating a large ship thing when I got a chance.  I suspected I may never be fully ready to take over, but let’s face it I don’t think any captain really is.

We continued on our conquest, but it was becoming clear that the Captain’s time at the helm was nearing it’s end.  He’d been cheating death for a few years now, and a permanent return to shore seemed eminent.  It seemed my time to take the wheel was fast approaching, but luckily the battles were winding down as the Rear admiral obeyed his orders to stand down.

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