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.