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.