Career Blindness

A Night in the Warehouse is about blindness, yours and mine.  So far I've been sharing my own peculiar insights into things others seem to miss.  Today I am sharing an epiphany most of you never needed to have.

Fifteen years ago, over a decade into my so-called career, I was asked a terrible question for the first time. “What do you want out of your career,” was the question, and it threw me. At that time I'd had three other jobs and been laid off en masse three times. Starting in 1991 I had put my identity into a startup company called “Worldshop” where we were inventing on-line shopping as we know it today, worked 90+ hours a week, and been paid $140 for the last six months' work... three years after the bankruptcy lawyers took their $300,000. I would not again make the mistake of confusing who I was with what I did. Of course, with that change came a lack of understanding of what a “career” is. All I had left was a series of jobs. Make no mistake, most of my jobs have been good jobs where I could make a real difference. These were jobs where it mattered that it was me doing them. Life was good, and so was work.

“What do you want from your career?” The question stuck in my mind like a beach in a gearbox. I knew I had to answer, quickly, so I answered with what I wanted out of work: a chance to learn, to apply and improve my talents, create new things that people like to use, and most importantly make a real difference: I want it to matter that it's me doing it, that my particular set of skills and talents matter. That's all well and good, but it's incomplete.

I have taken the intervening 15 years to occasionally wonder exactly what is this “career” people speak of. In that time I've worked for multi-billion-dollar corporations, startups with a dozen people, and everything in between. I've worked with large, mediocre consulting/temp firms with names we all know, and great smaller ones like Technical Engineering Consultants (Ann Arbor, MI) and Eclipse Consulting (Portland, OR). I've worked in industries including manufacturing, financial services, insurance, public school administration, environmental health and safety, and medical. I've been an IT Manager, a paeon-for-hire viewed with suspicion, and revered almost as a god. The order of these things is essentially random: there's no logical progression.

None of this gave me any insight into what this “career” thing is. In my quarter decade of building good tools for others, I've rebuilt systems destroyed on 9/11 and saved many a skilled person's job of choice from being overcome by drudgeries no one else knew how to automate. Surely this is what a career is, yes?

No. Not entirely, anyway.

In all of this, with the exception of Worldshop and the day I started consulting, I had been taking jobs because I needed them. When it came time to negotiate rates, I have since learned that others ask for what they want while I only ask for what I need. I always ended up with less than I needed. Sure, I made a difference for others, even a big difference, but five years ago at age 45 my bank accounts were all overdrawn, my credit cards over limit, my gas tank ¼ full, and I had no income I could see. In fifteen days, bills would be coming due. In fifteen days I would have to file bankruptcy.

That day, a call came. Two days later a telephone interview, followed quickly by an on-site interview. I asked the headhunter to overnight me $100 so I could fill the tank and drive the 215 each way. Two decades into my “career” and I'm bumming gas money. The offer came immediately, as did a long-overdue check from a client that saved me from sleeping in my car in March.

I have always worked hard to do the best I could by others at every opportunity. What that yielded me was net assets of more than $30,000 to the negative. The last five years have been a long, slow, hard, beat to windward trying to get to where the loss of one paycheck won't bankrupt me. Progress has been made. At this rate I will be able to retire sometime around my 90^th birthday. I don't like the area where I'm living. As for my job, I like the people and for several years enjoyed the work; but it's programming on mainframe-class machines for a multibillion-dollar company in the insurance industry. I don't get to be as creative as I can be, and when I do get the chance I get chastised for writing code that's too sophisticated for the others to read. My requests to teach advanced programming techniques fell on deaf ears. One of my equally-talented coworkers has also been criticized for using these techniques, despite the rave reviews his code receives from users and 75% reduction in the size of his code over that of others attempting the same things.

As a craftsman, I find this condition intolerable.

Yet even so it does seem to matter that it's me here. I should be happy, but I'm not, and this leads me to the epiphany I had yesterday: a career is what results from work when a person pursues the best interests of the group and himself. Looking back I see the heady days at Worldshop when I designed the entire system, built a team and we got it done. I see the difficult days at Penn Aluminum when I was brought in to turn around a dysfunctional IT department, and when the company set out to open a new manufacturing facility ours was the only department on schedule and anywhere near budget - we were under while some departments were as much as 300% over. I see those times when I started tasks I was not at the time qualified to finish, and finished them with style, courage, and skill. I see times when I fixed things no one else could, and in those times I took care of myself, too. That's what a career is, and though I don't have one now, I shall have one again.

Increasing Potential and Catching Bubbles

* * The Job Potential Model * *

The idea that a job is an agreement or contract between a consumer (employer) and a provider (the employed) is fundamental to modern economics.  When good, inexpensive, home computers came along, a great many people came to be employed in their manufacture.  Supply-side economists point out that none of these jobs existed before the creation of the supply of computers and there was no demand until the supply existed.  This is perfectly reasonable.  It also happens to be completely wrong because it's based on an incomplete view of what a job is and what demand is.

Example: there was always demand for computers.  It's been there for centuries... one need only look to the abacus, then to adding machines, then to calculators and finally personal computers in the form of desktop machines, laptops, PDAs, and smart phones to see that while they've evolved dramatically, the demand for a machine like this has been there at least since the dawn of agriculture.  As its cost has fallen and its capabilities have grown, of course, it becomes more useful and thus more valuable.  The demand remains relatively constant, but more and more of the demand is being realized by the suppliers.  Except in the case of luxury items and toys - and many computers are, in fact, purchased as such - you cannot create demand.  In the case of practical items and other necessities, demand is a function of population and environment.  In short, supply does not create demand; it realizes it.  It does not create need; it finds a need and fulfills it.  In some cases, people were not conscious of the need because they never considered there might be a solution.  These unrecognized needs, like computers, are the supply-siders' biggest examples, but as we already see, they did not create the demand.

The same principles apply to jobs.  Like energy, there are two kinds of jobs: in this case I call them realized jobs and potential jobs.  Potential jobs are all the jobs in the modern computer industry, before the introduction of the modern computer.  There was demand.  There was a need to be fulfilled.  There was great potential, but no one had figured out how to realize it.

Then came the early home computers.  They found a market with hobbyists who wanted them and engineers who needed them, and were savvy enough to solder, assemble, and program them themselves.  They met only a small part of the need.  Only a few of the millions of potential jobs were realized.  As the industry grew and matured, and in particular the software matured, it became more and more useful and attracted a bigger following.  The breakthrough came with the first spreadsheet: VisiCalc.  When accountants found that they could do their paper spreadsheets exactly as they had before, but with the speed of the computer to do the math, sales of computers - in particular the Apple 2 - skyrocketed and the world took notice.  More people were hired to meet the newly-realized demand.  In terms of demand and jobs, nothing had yet been created, only realized.

Or had it?

All of those new employees now had steady, well-paying jobs.  They had security and income, and found that that gave them opportunities: they could buy their own homes, travel, play, and make things that they couldn't before.  In short, their own demands increased.  When that happened, those demands became expressed as potential jobs.  When they spent their money on those new demands, they realized those jobs or enabled others to realize them.

In this model, I do not create jobs when I employ people: I create jobs when I pay them more than they need to simply survive.  If I do not pay them enough to increase their demands, I have no impact on the total number of jobs whatsoever.  True, I may have converted some jobs from potential to realized, but the creator of those jobs was someone else.

If the number of potential and realized jobs in an area is inelastic, as it is with grocery cashiers for example, and I hire one, I have realized one job.  Or have I?  If all of the potential jobs in that area have already been realized, then I am taking business from another business and taking that job as well.  Eventually, one of those two jobs will have to go.  In such a case not only am I not creating a job, I am not even realizing one: I am merely accumulating it.  In short, I have done nothing for anyone but myself.  Several large chain stores are in this category, and do not pay job-creating wages.  It is up to you, with your job-creating income, to decide whether you wish to spend that income to enable companies to realize those jobs or merely accumulate them.

* * The Bubble-Convection Model * *

As one typical person spends money in a store, he buys something from a person who has more.  The money he spends goes to the store, which first pays its suppliers.  After that, the company should concentrate on the people who brought that money in: the rank and file employees, the jobs that the store has realized, for it is these people who do the actual work of trade.  If an employer wants more people to buy his wares, or to step up and buy better-quality, more expensive wares, then he needs to pay his people well so that they can realize more jobs and give more people the ability to buy from him.

Not all of the money goes to the rank and file.  Some of it goes to the owners.  This should be enough for them to cover their risks and make a profit in accordance with that risk and their personal time and work put in.

So, hundreds of people shop in my store, and a fraction of all of that comes to me.

Imagine, if you will, oil in water.  There are thousands of people in the bottom of the pool, spending money.  Every dollar, or euro, or yen, or whatever, is an oil bubble and when it's spent it is released to float slowly upward.  My store is an umbrella designed to catch those bubbles.  Because of convection - supply costs and wages - some of what comes under the umbrella comes back to the bottom and some of it flows to other umbrellas at a similar level.  Some flows to other umbrellas at higher or lower levels, and some of it comes out the top, where I keep my own umbrella.  The same convection happens to my umbrella, with my home, my cars(s), my family, food, fuel, and so on, but I also collect more bubbles than anyone at the bottom ever will.  When I buy "rich people things," I release my bubbles upward and the process repeats.

Wealth does not trickle down: it bubbles up.  It comes from the bottom, where jobs are initially created, and each tier of umbrellas creates another tier of jobs.  The bubbles that stay under an umbrella do nothing.  The movement of these bubbles is the economy, and more convection there is, the more fair it is.  There must be many, many tiers of umbrellas to ensure the convection that creates a vibrant middle class and robust economy and lifts the bottom from poverty.  Remember, if all the ones at the bottom have "mad money," there are more bubbles rising for you to catch!

So as the shop owner with my own umbrella I now have a job-creating income greater than most, greater than any of my employees individually, but it certainly must not be greater than theirs collectively.  I should not have more disposable, job-creating income than all of my employees combined, unless I have very few employees.  If I don't pay my employees a job-creating wage, then by definition I am in violation of this principle.

So now I'm a good employer and I pay my people well, and I make a very good living myself.  When I go out and buy that expensive car or hand-crafted yacht, I am creating jobs again, and I have an obligation to create those jobs where they both meet my needs and do the most good.  If I have a choice between two vendors of sufficient quality, one that pays its people well and one that does not, I should tend toward the one that takes better care of its people, because those people will create more jobs with the money I give them than those who are not so secure.

This is why the middle class in America has been shrinking the last few decades: bigger corporations may be more efficient, but they vastly reduce the number of umbrellas, and that is bad for all of us.  "Too big to fail" is a phrase we've all heard, and it refers to a condition far beyond too few umbrellas.  It refers to umbrellas that are so large that if they break, other umbrellas will be unable to catch the bubbles and the economic convection engine breaks down.  We need to stop companies from ever getting close to being "too big to fail" and need to consider the detrimental effects of oligopolies in general and what we might do about them.

To recap, hiring people doesn't create jobs: PAYING people is what creates jobs and spending is what realizes them.  Fewer, larger umbrellas make a few people rich beyond their ability to spend it and truly create jobs, at the expense of good convection and jobs for the people who truly create them.

On Asperger's Syndrome, Ethics, and Mass Murder

A lot of people will be becoming very afraid of people with Asperger's Syndrome now.  Suddenly "Aspies" are scary people who might kill you.  Well, I've got news for you.

First, most aspies are a lot more like they guys on "The Big Bang Theory" than they are like the Sandy Hook shooter.  I don't use his name because I want those who might follow in hopes of becoming famous, pause.  If we don't speak their names, then at least we deny them that motive and they may choose a less destructive form of suicide.

Most aspies are quiet, introverted, highly focused (some would say obsessive) people with one remarkable interest.  Most have useful, or at least harmless interests.  You will find them most commonly represented among college professors - who else could put up with a decade of Ph.D. studies on a single subject like "vibration in flexible drive shafts?", engineers, and other intensely specialized fields where day-to-day one-on-one personal interaction isn't the main job requirement.

We don't know yet if the shooter's obsession was shooting people, but maybe it was.  I can't say.

What I can say is that I am obsessed with the connections between things: the interactions of forces; the ties that bind us together; and the roads on the map rather than the cities; the grammar more than the words.  That's the second bit of news: I have Asperger's Syndrome.  I am an aspie.  I am a software engineer, and I'm very good at it.

I spent six years in the Marine Corps, where having order maintained rigorously was comforting.  That life was easier than the chaotic civilian life I now lead... even the day I had to draw my pistol on someone carrying a rifle.  I won that exchange without any shots fired, and for that I remain grateful.

I own a few guns, but almost never get to take them out to the range for a little exercise.  I like the discipline, the simplicity, and the immediate results that come with shooting targets.  The sound is good, too: the "pop" of the rifle and the "crack" of the target.  Yet I haven't fired them in years.  Why?  I'm too busy with the things that occupy my attention to make time for it.

What occupies my attention are my job, my family, my post-2008 finances, my insatiable appetite for new information (demon Interweb), and my duty to others.  I mention duty last because it is what underlies all the other interactions.  The connection between me and the rest of my world is duty.  In all things, I seek the solution that works best for the greatest number while doing no harm to any.  Normally, I get the lowest return - often it's negative.

In 2002/2003 I wrote a book on the subject of ethics.  I finished it 3 days before the Space Shuttle Columbia broke up on re-entry.  I never found anyone who cared about the ethical musings of someone with a "syndrome" and no Ph.D. in ethics or philosophy.  Thanks to my sister, I've finally gotten some editorial review and I'm looking for a publisher again.

I tell you all of this because there are a lot of frightened people because one aspie went bad and you need to know that most of us aren't like that guy.  Most of us care deeply for the rules - far more so, in fact, than "neurotypical" people.  If the rules make sense to us, then we uphold them... sometimes quite inflexibly.  We expect everyone else to play by them, too, and we get very confused when they don't.

I was going to be more careful about revealing my condition until the media circus died down, for my own protection, but duty demands otherwise.  Please don't judge us - or any group of people - by the one very noticeable example.  I can guarantee you that any one very noticeable example is noticeable precisely because it does not fit in.  "One of these things is not like the others," and I do not speak its name.

Market Forces Cannot Regulate Health Care

You will forgive me if I repost something I wrote on another site in January of 2010, but it bears repeating.

One reason that it's impossible for the market to control the cost of health care is simple: there can be no fair market value for the service. That's right, Republicans, THERE CAN NEVER BE A FAIR MARKET VALUE FOR HEALTH CARE.

"That's just not true," say the free marketeers. "Fair market value would be set simply by doing away with any kind of socialized health care (some extremists even include private insurance in this) and making people pay attention to how much they pay for it."

But that's simply not true in this case because of the definition of fair market value: "The price agreed upon by a knowledgeable seller and a knowledgeable buyer when neither is compelled to the sale."

Except for routine checkups, where they buyer is not immediately compelled, you will NEVER have more than one of these three conditions: the knowledgeable seller. In most cases, the buyer is unknowledgeable, very much so relative to the seller, and is compelled to the sale. This means it's not just a seller's market but a robber's market made of unknowledgeable buyers (it takes YEARS of study to catch up) who are compelled to buy from increasingly savvy and well-organized sellers.

On Discovering Boxes

By the time the phrase "thinking outside of the box" came into common usage, I'd been through so many major life changes I couldn't understand the metaphor.  "What box," I thought.  "Why not just think about all the things that are and watch them in action?"  The concept of thinking symbolically was foreign to me since the great majority of my thinking is done by direct visual modeling and then only once the idea is complete is it translated into the symbols we call language.  It's kind of a disadvantage socially, as I just can't keep up in real time.  The advantage, though, is that I see things so differently from most people that when I can get my insights into the conversation it's usually a good thing.

A colleague of mine recently informed another colleague that not only do I not think inside the box, I don't even think inside the warehouse.  Well, what I do for a living consists quite unofficially of wandering around the warehouse looking for boxes and describing those boxes to their inhabitants.  You see, in order to escape from prison you need to know not only that you're in prison, but where the walls are and what they're made of.  Only then can you begin to think about the walls rationally and probe them for weakness.  If you see your prison as "just the way it is," then you're trapped by your own mind far more thoroughly than by the walls themselves.
For me the problem is the reverse, and just as troublesome in many circumstances.  I'm so far out I can't even perceive "the box," so I tend to expect people to be able to move freely also and understand me as I speak... but I've only recently learned how to speak with regard to the baggage of layered meanings that the boxes place upon words.  The box acts as a mistranslator, separating two people with a common language that isn't actually common at all.  The perspective from out here is very helpful, but until we both understand the box we have no common frame of reference.  Sure, some gems get through (both ways) undamaged, but for the most part that's by luck as much as intent.

So we come to A Night In The Warehouse.  In public, things are harder than dealing one-on-one.  It's dark, there aren't any lights, and nearly all the boxes are charcoal gray.  They're all similar, constructed out of symbols made from generations of teachings both good and bad, traditions, and local cultural practices.  They're all different, with bumps and bulges and dents from where their occupants have run into them or they've run into each other.  Some are old-fashioned wood or corrugated paper, some are high-tech carbon fiber, but most are some kind of hodgepodge of materials gathered in expedience.  The boxes overlap and share some space, yet the shared spaces have walls that only affect some.  The people in the boxes can see each other, but they still can't see through all the walls, just as they cannot see the walls themselves.

I can hear my footfalls on the hard floor, and they echo off the boxes.  The echoes are confusing at first, with all the different materials, sizes, shapes, angles and bumps.  The geometry is insanely complex.  It's hard to know what I'm hearing.  What are these things?  From one of the boxes I hear a clear, calm voice: "what's that?"

"It's just me."

"Just who?  Where are you?"

"I'm walking the warehouse floor.  Where are you?"

"What warehouse?  What are you talking about?"

I fumble around in the darkness, following the voice until I strike the box that contains its owner.

"There, I found you."

"I'm in a crowd of people and there's no one new here."

"To me it seems you're alone in a box, in a warehouse full of similar boxes."

"You're crazy."

"No, we're just both partially blind."

"How can that be?"

And so it begins.  For both of us.