Aleksandra, Marty and I had lunch yesterday. I like them both. It’s pleasant to work with people you respect and who enjoy one another’s company.
I’ve been doing a lot of stewing about work, career and stuff, and it was interesting to learn that they have both had similar thoughts. Marty is married and his wife is going to graduate school for social work. Aleksandra’s husband is in the post-doctoral program in physics at UT. So it turns out the three of us are essentially the breadwinners for our respective families.
The economy has been recovering from what seems like a hangover more than anything else, after the party of the last decade or so. The net effect on us is that we no longer enjoy the luxury of changing jobs at will, or at least it seems like there are fewer good options. That affects the psychology of the worker as well as the corporation — in a market with wider choices, a worker who’s unhappy is more likely to just leave, so you don’t have people hanging around who don’t want to be there. Similarly, the company knows that they don’t need to work as hard to keep employees happy when they are tempted to rely on the market pressures to keep workers in place.
This induces a kind of feedback situation in which everyone gets more and more miserable.
Aleks asked the question, “where are we going to be in 20 years? there don’t seem to be too many 55 year old programmers running around Broadjump. they wouldn’t hire us. not everyone can be in management or on the board of directors. so where will we be?”
It’s a question I have been asking myself for 15 years now. I once thought a management track would be one solution, but for some reason, I don’t seem to fit the profile. I’m not even sure why, exactly, but now I may be rationalizing when I realize I despise low level managers. Their authority orientation makes them seem like dogs, serving their masters, and the middle managers serve their own masters in turn, each claiming the work of his subordinates as if it were his own. The chain continues in some cases to absurd lengths until you reach the executives, founders or owners.
These, it sometimes seems, have more in common with the best and brightest of workers — a disdain for the chain of ass-kissing middle managers — a regard for them as overhead, a necessary evil.
In a technological world that changes so rapidly and thoroughly, experience isn’t worth much, where a young person willing to work harder for less can be as or more productive than an experienced one, why bother with us?
It’s a reasonable business decision on the one hand, but a disturbing realization to anyone on the receiving end.
This line of thinking has led me to the conclusion that its only a matter of time before something bad happens. So the prudent thing to do is to plan to go into business for myself.
I’ve been an author and consultant. I liked it a lot better than what I’m doing now. So maybe its time I stopped making compromises and started listening to my heart.