(c) 2004-2010 ruzz

“People know you for what you’ve done, not for what you plan to do.”  ~Author Unknown

it’s been 15 months and 3 days since my last confession, er, unemployment. two and a half years ago i had a little dance with my own frailty, learnt some stuff about the consequences of living life in single-serving installments of cash. found the hard side of commerce as explained through the poverty that comes from a serious illness and the subsequent year long recovery.

before i got sick i had quietly worked as a contractor for nearly 10 years. building my skills, contacts and experience to the point where I was actually starting to thrive pretty well. A lot of those years were lean—read abject poverty—and only in the two years leading up to illness did I start making any real money.

I came through my little brush with death okay. it’s pretty easy to die. your body does all the hard work while you just sit there only partially engaged sorta interested in these new experiences. the hard work is living.

the hard work is coming back from being near dead. you come back a tenth of the person you were physically. emotionally you develop a keen desire for stability and security. I came back to nothing but pain and a world that kept on humming like it always did—churning out the usual costs of existing—while my ability to produce anything i could trade for money was dead for almost a year.

the physical recovery was hard but natural. it just happens. over time you recover. you live and your body comes round in time. maybe not all the way round, but round. but while you do that your whole world comes apart.

a year after I got out of the hospital i was still dealing with nearly crippling pain on a daily basis, had amassed a massive debt, lost many of the trappings of my hard work (my car, my camera, my nice home, my sexy little mac notebook, etc). and, more importantly i had lost the sense that I was in control of my own life.

i had always felt my experience was entirely determined by my will to craft reality to be what i wanted. but a year after, everything had changed for me. I no longer felt i had any access to that wellspring of energy and power to craft. moreover, i felt as though all the risks i had ignored without much thought—like living without a nest egg or an endgame—had literally come home to roost.

so i made a pretty simple decision. get a job. a day job. a nice stable, two cheques a month day job. no more fighting it out daily for my existence. no more challenging myself to be smarter than the world. trade those challenges for the challenge of commitment, of not getting border or antsy. of swallowing down my reluctance to be directed or used for my energy and just settle into a job.

it turns out i lucked into a pretty good job. i got to work from home which made keeping my life pretty much what it was. I had a good manager who cared about the end result which meant i could do things like set my own hours and more or less work when i felt inspired to work. he gave me lots of room to determine my experience in exchange for delivering on my promises. sometimes that backfired, but on the whole it worked because i also lucked into a position that offered an endless stream of challenges. tight little complexities that needed to be untangled. possibilities to use creativity and experience to solve actual problems for users. and the freedom to draw on my experience to help shape the future we were building.

a heady combination. almost unimaginable in a job that gave you nice regular pay.

but it turns out running things like that isn’t the most sustainable business model. we spent over a year chasing the whims of our boss; trying to be everything to every customer. we had no core focus for our work, and while each project built upon what was already the lack of focus made it practically impossible to get to the point where we were taking cash off customers for our hard work.

meanwhile, our competition hacked out some pretty crappy code that was focused, and was ready for users and made money.

then they bought us.

oh the bittersweet ironies of the market economy. I literally lived the experience of having a better product beat by better marketing and better senior management (better at taking money off people, at least).

I wouldn’t have hired most of their developers to program my PVR yet they won. they owned us and the expression of our best ideas. that stung.

when they offered me a position with their company, apathy and probably mourning the change compelled me to take it even though i knew it was a horrible mistake. I was being asked to develop in a platform i felt was all but dead even if it produces cash by the truckload. I had to step away from my core technology stack. step away from a merit based employment. step away from freedom. step away from my experience and skill mattering. but, at least i still had regular pay, right?

i made it a total of three paycheques before i quit. I have no replacement for that income. i have no clear plan on how to survive. I don’t even really know what i want. I just know what i don’t want. I don’t want to be a cog in the machine. I don’t want to be divorced from everything i’ve learnt about programming over the last decade. I don’t want to give the best part of my day so some ass-clown can drive an escalade and live in a 4000sq foot house.

so maybe i didn’t die after all.

this may sound more principled than it really is. an important facet of throwing yourself into the unknown is couching it in a romantic ideal of some sort or other. it comforts the terror that rouses when you watch your bank account dwindle with no real plan for filling it back up again.

in truth, selfishness played a much larger part in this than i’d care to admit. Arrogance too. Its a flaw of my character that i can’t take orders, direction, or it seems pay from people I feel are less intelligent than me. I can’t submit my will to what i think are stupid choices, wrong-headed intentions and i can’t seem to quell my ego to play nice with someone above me in the food chain just because they happen to be higher than me in the food chain. I have to respect how they conduct themselves. I never had a single problem like this in my 13 months at my old job.

that’s the surface level reaction anyways. below that was deep sense of dissatisfaction at having parts of me i’ve worked very hard on just dismissed as not relevant to their cash objectives.

primarily, my experience building applications for over a decade in many languages and platforms. my experience working with users and customers on usability. this new company felt it was more important that i log into msn right at 9am than i wrote extend-able, clean, elegant code. they thought it was more important i did things the way the little dictator who ran my app thought things should be done usability wise than if i knew anything about usability from working with tens of thousands of real users for over a decade.

i felt so deeply negated and interchangeable. i went from feeling like a vital part of the future of a small business to a faceless code monkey. paycheque or not, i couldn’t do it.

so now i’m unemployed again. first time in 15 months and 3 days. my mother is filled with terror about my future. my mind is fighting the conditioning of thinking i have another tidy cheque coming in a few weeks. my heart feels anxious but rewarded.

i’ve outgrown the childish rebellion of just doing what i want because i want to. after getting sick i really internalized the value of security. you could say i learnt how cold this world can be to your need and i never want to be back there again. and as i sit here, free to do what i want, poised as i am on the ledge of complete uncertainty i am wedged neatly between my desire to define my own experience and my complete terror of not being up to that task.

i’m doing it anyways though.

i may be the old man on every programming team. i may not absorb new technology as fast as i used to, or have endless months of 18 hour days left in my body. but i learnt one of the hardest lessons you’ll ever learn as a programmer. that writing ideal code in a bubble will get you bought by someone writing crap code with a good sales team.

and i think that little gem is one you can only learn by flushing a years worth of your best ideas and most beautiful work down the shitter. I also think it’s the lesson you need to learn to draw hard lines around where good enough is good enough and not living in a fantasy world.

so now i’m going to embark on a couple things that can put that lesson immediately to work. one my pet project which i’m still not telling you about, and the other is doing contract work again. I always failed at contact work because i was being paid to get something done, and i was trying to get something done perfectly.

the two shall never meet.

more than anything though. more than the fear of uncertainty and the unknown. more than a knee jerk compulsion to watch my bank account as i spend. more than my sneaking a look at monster for the comfy protection of a day job, im eager to see if i still have it in me to push myself to define my own life.

I walked away from myself after i got sick. i saw how frail and weak i could be. I lost faith in myself and my ability to fashion a the world the way i wanted it to be and i don’t know if i still have what it takes to force reality into the shapes i want it to be. I don’t know if i have the will, energy, and motivation it takes to fight back against a never ending tide of entropy. but i’m willing to try. i’m wiling to ask the question of myself and give myself a little rope to answer it. 

just don’t tell my mom.