Friday the 17th

Here is an odd thing.      I was thinking on my life, and it's various chapters, and was struck by some of the parallels built within them.

My life both in London and Technology can be described in pretty much the same structural terms.   beginning with a bit of bravado, followed by a minor deception then hard work to a point where I achieved a degree of independence and a degree of success to which I could be financially comfortable while at the same time never attaining complete financial success.

London

In London, I was young and fearless, and even though I was not legally allowed to work and live in the UK, I decided that that is what I wanted to do anyway.   I flew over there on a cheap flight at the age of 21, then walked into an NHI (National Health Index) office and asked for a NHI number and they gave me one, even though years later I was told they never should have given me one.    

This NHI number is sort of like a social security number in America.     This number allowed me to get low level jobs.  When challenged on my legality I just told people I was born in the UK and grew up in America (the deception).     The low level jobs gave me a job history footing that I took advantage of, working my way up through the restaurant and night club scenes until I became a very skilled bartender.    This allowed me to eventually not have to work for anyone one club full time, and in the end I could work for a number of clubs independently, maybe  one night or two each week, but at different clubs.   This gave me the independence in being able to choose who to work for and when, and no one was able to own me completely.     

I was also able to pull this off in Sydney Australia.   I worked all over town there in the couple of years I lived there.

This independent work  suited my personality in that I have never been able to allow myself to be completely owned by anyone, as I tend to follow my own compass.  This is good and bad.   You follow your own nose and it allows you to have the confidence to trust yourself to solve problems and get things done where other's fall short, but it also gets you in trouble when you are asked to do things that you do not believe make sense to you.    

Technology

At some point in Buffalo, NY I was working as a Kelly Girl as I could competently type in an office.    This was a step up from being a cab driver for five years in Boston.   But I had gotten a computer cheap and it had the MS Basic programming language on it, and I taught myself and found myself pretty good at it.    This led to me learning other languages, Dbase, then FoxPro, VB etc, database languages that were potentially more commercially lucrative and good skills to get jobs with.

The problem was that every time I tried to get a Dbase or Foxpro job the first question anyone asked me was whether I had a college degree, which I did not have, so the job interview usually lasted just long enough until that first question.  Massive Roadblock.   So the deception.   I just put on my resume that I had a degree.    This got me into my first corporate work at American Express, which then inevitably led to Pfizer, then Johnson and Johnson, then Adobe, HP, etc etc.  25 years of lucrative corporate work.    

I have no problem being innovative in my work, so I enjoyed a lot of project success during my technology career, but found that I still ran into the same problems that I had in London, ie that while I am a good problem solver and people value me for that, in the end I do not listen very well, as I only do things that make sense to me, and it often gets me into trouble.  Hence me slipping into independent project consulting, as it suited my personality.   

The thing about technology projects is that most of them are always half on the point of failure because the ALLURE and the HYPE of technology is that it can do anything, and VPs driven by the mirage of quick success will buy into that without thinking it through.   Corporate technolgy can also be very expensive.  This is why very few technology efforts survive.   Lots of money thrown at them without a clear understanding of what success will look like.

This became my sweet spot, as I could always jump into a technology project and stabilize it.  My deep secret.  Just throw half the shit out, and start listening to what the users actually need.    There is more to it than that, but that is just two basic things.     By the time I showed up on a project, the VP's job was at risk because they spent all this money and the project was failing, inducing a little panic in them, and making them able to put their ego aside and listen, so it was fairly easy to convince them to do some basic things to put the project back on track.

I was good enough as a firefighter on these projects that I was eventually able to work fairly independently, and not overstay my welcome, as no one in the corporate world really wants an independent thinker around.    I was good enough to keep around long enough to put the fires out, just not the best person to have around once the fires were out.   The egos would come back, and they would start mucking things up again.   Time to go.

I realized who I was.   Useful, but not someone you want around full time.   I was ok with that.

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One day I was musing on my life and I realized how similar my life in London and my life in Technology and how they both folded into my personality.   

Funny how that works.