Not the right time

A friend I've worked with in a parallel way since the early '90s got picked up by another company this year.  She'd been browsing the ads and granted, she lives in the Seattle area, but still she was actively looking for a way to "escape."

"Escape"... such an ugly word for what we want, the exact opposite of what we plow ourselves into every day.  Since I've never done "victim" very well, I can honestly say that I stuck around some of my jobs as biding time while putting my ducks in a row.  One of the points the transition specialist, Marianne Lewis, I've been working with to stage my own coup helped me recognize is that assholedness can be a function of frustration.  Maybe you're not a bastid because you were born a bastid, but because each day pushes you even further into frustration.  At what point does this frustration begin to eat away at who you know yourself to be.

I can tell you it's weird to begin looking for a job without a job.  In some ways, it's nearly seen as "shameful."  That's easy enough to tell because when you open your mouth to ask people for recommendations, or to join you in LinkedIn, you can actually feel the "flinch."  But that is work which needs to be done in this job of searching for another job - while unemployed.  That said, y'all are still employed and you should be working together to encourage each other in the work you do.

We've often said that we stay with the job because we love the people we work with.  To that end, practice not only sending internal "thanks", but asking someone whose work you admire to connect with you in LinkedIn.  Write them a recommendation on LinkedIn as well as an email to their boss, or some other company sponsored thank you note.  We need to take care of each other because the work is so demanding, the company is always in some sort of transition, there's always the disappointment of someone else getting the raise, the promotion, the recognition.  It is not enough these days to limit your recognition, or thanks to a verbal pat on the back.  I've talked to too many people who think that their current world is all that's open to them when the truth is that right now the tech sector is exploding.  There are not enough engineers or planners to do the work.  

Each day I see more than 500 notices pass through my email from Indeed, LinkedIn, Hire, Glassdoor, Dice, Monster, and Telecomm Careers.  Of course there are duplicates and a myriad of stuff which doesn't apply.  There are also a lot of people applying for the Network Design Engineering, Planning positions.  It's insane.  Security is also huge.  The point is, the world is big, guys.  Really.  Really.  Really Big.

So take baby steps.  Daydream at one of the big search sites by putting in crazy assed job titles, see

Asolo, Italy

what comes up.  Write a recommendation for someone whose work you admire.  Begin making your LinkedIn connections.  LinkedIn is for you to do your job stalking.  Got a company you're interested in?  Type it in in LinkedIn and see how many 2nd degree connections you have and who the first degree connections are.  Are they anyone you'd feel comfortable asking for an introduction for just an informational interview?  Build your connections in LinkedIn.  I can tell you, I was told to target the 500+ because then you are very attractive to recruiters and others who want to know you.  My count is 350 right now, up from the 147 in September which was the base I'd allowed to "naturally" grow.  People do not respond right away to connection requests.  This takes time.  Get comfortable asking people to post their "thanks" to you not just in email, but also there as well. 

Sure, it might not be the "right time" to move, but if you're unhappy, you'll feel a helluva lot better when you begin to take steps to make your life different.  So don't just sit there and develop your inner asshole, git to it!  One small step.  Don't complain about work today until you've made one positive step toward making your life better.  

To know what you prefer

The actual quote from Robert Louis Stevenson is:  “To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.”  This is my motto for this badbatical I'm taking.  

On my "walk about" so far I can only tell you what I "don't prefer."  I've met representatives of several companies through the various Meetups and I walk away with, "erm.."

Meetup - Code Sisters

At GeekGirl Con this year, I ran into some women who wanted to just get together on Sundays to work on their "forever" or game coding projects.  I organized Code Sisters Seattle and we met at the Beveridge Place beer bar in West Seattle.  Since then we've had actual hosts like Bungie and Seattle Attic give us room.

We meet once a month to drink beer (or wine), eat old Halloween candy, order a pizza or go out to dinner.  Just write code for fun with other women because it's interesting to us.

The hyperlink above gets you to the email sign up.  I had started a blog, but there's not much to say beyond when and where the next meeting point is.  I'm using the time, myself, to work on my R stuff.  Others are writing their own games.

You can also follow us on Twitter @CodeSistersSea

It's 12 o'clock, do you know where your lunchpail is?

The person I've been working with for the past year on making this transition has warned me more than once that it will Take Time for (as I put it) the sediment to fall to the floor and the water to clear.   So, I was sitting there at C&P Coffehouse in West Seattle, thinking to make friends and update my blogs, contemplate The Next Step and why I wasn't working on my training when I allowed myself to be friendly to people who were having email problems.

Now really, how many of us spend time during the weekday hanging out at coffeehouses... that's what I thought.  Same here.  Neither did I before this time.  I'd spend time in European coffeehouses / bars while travelling, but that is not the same thing.  American coffeehouses during the weekday seem to be filled with industrious people Doing Things, or, at least appearing to be Doing Things.  I ended up engaged in computer support.

This, I am now convinced is why coffee houses are so popular in the U.S.  As David says, "the home user..." has no where else to go since tech support companies no longer want to support the home user.  So, they go to the coffee house in hopes of engaging a bored Web Designer or blogger to "fix" their latest technical issues with their email.  I spent my first 30 minutes looking at some guy's "abandoned" Apple email & address book.  Not because I have much experience with Apple or Apple email and address books, but because I could do a web search.  I thought he was just going to go up for coffee and come back, but he never did.  I eventually found how apple mail doesn't have the contact list embedded in their email program but has spawned the hellaciously ineffective "Address Book" which has like no features.  I exported his contact list but he had such a messy desktop, I couldn't find it to edit it and reimport it.  I tried to explain to him... and then we got into a discussion of technology, technological change, poetry, painting, and Prometheus.

Next was the guy whose gmail account was sending all emails to trash and he'd "really" talked to google support who told him his "IP had been hacked".  uhm...

The web designer sitting next to me was much more patient that I was.  He obviously has experience with being The Techie in the Coffee House.  He tried to check out the guy's settings.  The guy was sure there was another problem, but didn't want to delete all his labels.  He'd been doing some weird setting thing, was getting a shit ton of spam in his email.  An hour later, I just had to pack up.  He'd repeated himself, his story, and was still unconvinced of the need to delete the million and one labels he'd set up, much less change his google password (because he has 3 pages of them - like "Who doesn't?).

Next time, I'm wearing my ear buds and listening to my Statisical Inference videos instead.

Toes Curled With Happiness

I went to a New Tech Seattle Meetup with Dave & L. last night.  It was my second time.  I've enjoyed both times because the focus is on Seattle startups from inception to full maturity.  In fact, there was an interesting presentation by Nordstrom's VP of Personalization, Analytics, and Mobile Apps, Scott Jones.

However, not all moments were good.  There were some uncomfortable moments talking to a senior guy at GoDxxxx about how they build out their data centers.  Dave was standing behind and noticed the guy's tension because, of course, me being me, I started prying and challenging and questioning and being my usual obnoxious self.  I wanted more info that I was going to be given.  Rats.  That said, I signed up for the email thingy even though I was wearing a "white label" name tag which meant I was neither a job seeker, nor recruiting, and got an ORANGE (yes, shouty capitals are required b/c of my excitement) t-shirt.  The interesting thing I did learn was they are very focused on a specific traffic profile / user "type" for their data centers... and that's the kind of thing I want to learn about at these meetups.  And with the companies at New Tech Seattle, I can ask a lot of questions.

That said, this morning's extrovert hangover meant I felt like a fool.  Who the hell do I think I am, thinking I can jump tracks, jump careers, jump all over the "natural progression" of responsible adulthood?  But then, I got a lovely email response from someone I'd met at yet another meetup (Startup and Growth Company Group) whom I'd emailed last evening after New Tech.  I'd emailed him b/c he's trying to launch a small business coaching executives in speech writing and presentations and since there were two tragic presentations out of the five or six at New Tech, I thought he might be interested in the two companies as well as what he might bring to the table at the New Tech meetup.  I have an actual lunch date and might make a new friend.  That is so cool.  I've been collecting business cards and following up with people who interest me, but that's because I'm rabidly friendly.  I am also still experiencing Tech Talk withdrawl.  It ain't pretty, but at least at the hackathons, the coding meetups, and the other tech related get-togethers, I can be with people who speak my language.

It's just that it's so much more simple than mobility.  Google's +50K queries per second which took 1K "computers" to answer a query (I keep hearing, "there's a million computers at Google") and I just kind of shrug.  I'm not even sure I'm interested.  That said, listening to Scott Jones' discuss the work Nordstroms has been doing to capture and classify color and users' color purchasing habits and my toes curl I get so happy.  That company does have some interesting marketing drives.  I wish they'd given him longer to speak.

The Inception of the Nexus of Pink

I can never take credit for the awesomeness which was the Nexus of Pink.  That belongs to my friends, who became family.  There were sometimes daily offerings left at my cube with some little whizzy-wiig someone thought appropriate for the space.  Other times, I'd return from vacation and see the thoughtful measures, the time and effort friends would expend on adding to the decoration.  I do admit to I beginning the "accretion" of the Objects of Power to battle the forces of PointyHairedness and Career De-well-it-ment.  This began after ReOrg #12 under the ReOccurring Veep who moved me out of my local org and into the cow pastures of Both-hell.  

Ahhhh.... memories... light the corners of what's left of my mind.  'Twasn't all fun 'n good back in The Days and those were Dark 'uns.  They put me, the woman who should have the cone of silence, in the cube at the end of a long corridor where the only real place I could mount my monster monitor (remember tubes guys?) was so that my back was facing the hall.  As the youngest in the workgroup (albeit the one with the most experience in wireless) I got the last choice.  Or rather, no choice at all.  Thus was born my irritation and in a fit of pique one day, I cobbled together The Wand.  

That first object of power, crafted from dead birthday balloon ribbons, glue stick from the office supply cabinet (remember the days when you could actually find a fucking pencil?), white board markers, and WORD graphics.  This was the first application of the Gold Star.  If they were going to stick me with my back facing the end of a long corridor, well, then, There Must Be Decoration!

For those who never had the chance to see the finished version, here is a picture below.  It includes the point out of my coal black heart which was proven to rest well in a used Starbucks Grande Mocha no whip cup.  

The black heart was hand crafted in the shop of one of the best effin' install lead / mangers (I can't remember his exact title, besides it's not like we kept the same titles for more than 9 months before the next reorg).

The pictures are from RTC, not Bothell, but from such sprouts is chaos born...

My title of Evil Seed came to be after yet ANOTHER FREAKIN' OFFICE MOVE (who says shouty characters don't have their place in communication?).  This one moved me from Bothell to Willows.  I was placed mid corridor in yet another rat's maze of cubicles where one would wander around trying to remember if it was left at the lunchroom or right to be able to find one's own cube.  I had vendors who couldn't find me, so I added sticky notes to the beige walls with arrows pointing the way to my cube.  And seeing as I am more of a Warning, or a Bad Example, I labelled it for what it was, who I am.

One of my great friends actually hacked the official Dingular cube labels and made it official at RTC.  Before that, it was just a sticky note which never got removed.  Again, I was the one who could deface a smilie, but figure out how to find and hack the cube labels... nuh-uh, no way.  Ida had an allergic reaction.  I think of this as my ability to bring out the creative, the risk-taker, the thoughtfulness of others.  It's probably why I should go into management.  

Restlessness

Dave 'n I took a roadtrip today.  Of course, it was completely unplanned.  I had to get out of the house.  I'm finally shedding my cold and Dave has too and I just needed to Go Do Something, See Something.  I was reading a novel by an author I've never read before and the main character, a young woman just finishing college is having a difficult time responding to the chronic question of, "What are your plans for your career?"

Ugh.  Even at my age I can sympathize with "How hard was that?  How hard is it to choose one path out of thousands?  To pick a star from the sky?"  or "I want things, so many things.  I just can't seem to pinpoint them down to a career that will sustain me."   (This is the Wonder by Tracey Ward)

So much opportunity, so many choices...  Like it was intentional the first time?  In my case, no it was not.  It was accident.  A complete set of uncoordinated circumstances which had nothing to do with "lifelong dreams", or "consideration."  Cellular, wireless communications, was just beginning to be commercial when I got out of engineering school.  I knew no one who had a cell phone.  Most cell phones at the time were mounted in the car because that was the only time you "needed" a phone.  The first portable I had was what we called "the brick."  I can't even find a picture of the one I had.  The Motorola is the only one the Google MapReduce throws up any more.

But no, I had no ambitions, no plans to work in cellular / wireless communications, much less become a Field Technician for McCaw Communications after engineering school.  Heck, I didn't even think about an electronics engineering degree after I got my B.A. from Sewanee.  Heck, I used to make fun of DeVry while at Sewanee.  Then I got my first load of books and HP Calculator.  That first trimester kicked my ass.

The interview I had at McCaw with BB1 (Bossy Boss #1)was The Best Interview Ever.  I laughed so hard.  I felt so comfortable.  And NiD1 (non-Idiot-Director1), never batted an eye at me in my silk skirt and bolero jacket with suede pumps applying for a job where hauling generators, going up ridgeback mountains in the snow in the middle of the night, and working with 200 A rectifiers was part of the job description.  I wish I could say I remember interviewing with UUEULM1(Unknown Entity Upper Level Management #1), because back in those days the company was small enough that it was a given you'd interview with the Regional whatever he was at the time.  The McCaw culture was "Hire and Develop Great People" and the talent I worked with showed they walked the walk.  The company was legendary for innovation and quality.

So, whatever happens next for me is not really planned and I'm okay with that.  Before I left AT&T, I knew what kind of a price drop I could accept and still maintain the lifestyle I've grown accustomed to.  It might be writing romance novels, it might be trying to figure out the math behind "Lightning" Fast.  And I'm okay with not knowing.  Really okay with it because I've had so many good things come to me because I, A)  Applied as a dark horse for a scholarship for a year's study in Denmark; 2)  Applied to the private university of my choice without a high school diploma in guarantee, nor the funding to support it; 3) Moved across country from Georgia to San Francisco, but then accepted my grandmother's offer to fly me to Alaska; 4) Signed on the dotted line to move from Alaska to Phoenix and go to engineering school to get a degree in electronics when I couldn't pass a computer programming course at Sewanee, 5) move from Phoenix to Seattle because it was beautiful; 6)  Took a job with McCaw Cellular because I laughed all the way through the interview.  And had the most amazing career and worked with people who appreciated the hell out of the work I did.  Who could ask for anything more?

* Insert Quaking Knees Here *

So, I looked a perfectly good career in the eye and shot it in the face.  What next, you might ask.  You do have a plan, don't you?  It takes a job to get a job, don'tcha know.

Of course, I know all of these things.  The real problem in my mind is that the world has gotten so much more complex, so much more interesting in the twenty-five years I've been employed and reproducing in my petri dish that I don't really know what is going on outside of that dish.  There are new methods of doing things, new programming languages battling it out.  Frankly, if there hadn't been publicly accessible big datasets, I probably wouldn't have left my job.  The work I was doing was The Bomb.  We were learning all sorts of new things about what congestion is, what application crashes look like, how to find latency in networks.  And the datasets... ahhhh the datasets were beautiful.  We were pulling configuration data and parsing that out to understand what a true denominator was for the traffic numerator.  We were linking across vendors and platforms.  I had the coolest. job. ever.  Really.

'cept I'd been doing it for umpteen bejillion years.  And, turns out, it's made me a data snob.  Like really... I hear "80 terabytes of data" and I yawn.  I hear, "a million records a week / a day", I pooh-pooh.  They talk about 75 categorical features and I snort.  Don't get me started on the 108 fields of interest.  I made Excel workbooks with more columns than that.  So there's a lot of data being called "Big" out there which is more "dainty" than anything.  And this is a wonderful thing to recognize because it was hard to walk away.  I worked with some of the smartest, funniest, most driven people on the planet implementing a new world of communications and it was cool.

By staying in the field, I got to stay close to that bleeding edge and learn continuously for twenty-five years.  How I survived the minefields of layoffs, buy-outs, re-orgs, and severed divisions always seemed to come down to someone wanted me to move onto some other job with only a horrible commute (not an immensely horrible, or I would have gotten a package) which didn't qualify for a package.  I had three bosses over this twenty-five year period who recognized and rewarded the work I produced, and encouraged my bad behavior.  To those three men, I say (and have said), thank-you because I hit what felt like the pinnacle of success to me.  And being at that pinnacle, looking around at the view of my own personal vista was great for a few years, but the question of "What Next" began to haunt me like a yodeled echo.

I mean, what more could an engineer want after she's acquired a Hello Kitty computer bag, a Lenin mustache & goatee, and a Battlefield t-shirt?

Starting Over

It's the day after my 54th birthday, the beginning of the fourth month since I left AT&T.  I promised folks I'd write, keep in touch, let them know what life is like out here in the wild, but I haven't.  I'm only now beginning to settle down and explore the world outside the slow rolling sap capture of Cube Hell.

I've taken to calling this time a "badbatical."  Obviously a play on the word "sabbatical", which sounds too closely proximate to "sad-batical" for my liking.  There is nothing sad about this time even though I do believe my body parts were held together by stress and once that stress was removed I seemed to have physically fallen apart what with the sciatica, then the colds, a flu and whatnot.  Too fuckin' bad.  I still am enjoying my time, albeit at a more leisurely pace than I'd planned.  So I'm studying, taking classes, reading,  I've started going to Meetups and I started one of my own.  I'm taking in as much of the world as I can through sight, sound, and keyboard clacking as possible.  Yes, I've even taken to hanging out at C&P Coffee just to watch people tides.  There is so much industry taking place in Seattle.

The world is huge and it's the Tower of Babel in programming & query languages out here in the wild.  This is one true reason I had to leave AT&T.  Now is the time of the Big Bang for what I do / did.  The data explosion is happening.  Right.  Now.  The acquisition, storage, analysis, summarization, and visualization is moving faster than corporations can keep up with.  Human ants are making anthills; networks are being created like neural connections in infant brains; complexity is compounding and I have to go stand out in the middle of this storm.  I want a second lightning strike in my life.  My odds are more like 1 in 6 (learned this in class on Statistical Inference) , not 1 in 7 million because of conditioning.  Those are pretty good odds and Seattle is a small city.