reesesWeb

I've had a quite pleasant time in SFO so far, talking to a couple people about jobs. It's interesting going back to "employment" after doing a couple years of independent consulting. First of all, there's the brute money aspect. Thinking about dropping my gross income by 70% feels shocking¹, and the idea of working for a salary -- not being "rewarded" directly for working 50, 60, 70, or 80 hours a week -- has become nigh incomprehensible.

At this point, it's also hard to define a "role", and that's been probably the second biggest hurdle. My last engagement was solid gold, go anywhere and write my own way, and to a large extent, that's what's happening. People are creating roles or jobs that they either hadn't planned to create, or have decided to create ahead of schedule. That's awesome, and obviously very flattering. However, because I'm not looking at the same type of organisations, everyone has their own idea of what to do with me, and it doesn't always ride well with my telling-people-what-to-do-being-obnoxiously-bossy nature.

That aside, what I would call the biggest hurdle, because I can freely discuss it at this point, is the immense burn out I have felt as a result of the last two years. I can't say all of that engagement was bad, because it wasn't. The initial push to stabilise a poorly-built site that crashed repeatedly and continuously upon launch, and prepare it for huge holiday volumes, made the first few months exciting and obviously very, very lucrative, working long weeks and weekends and racking up crazy billable hours.

Something happened partway through last year, and continued to grow this year, that made me enjoy the engagement less and less. I'm being very careful not to name specifics here, either in terms of companies or people, because the people who matter know the details anyway. However, the problem amounted to my role, as I had grown it, not fitting into another organisation's mold, and this organisation is much larger than I am, and suddenly owned everything from bottom to top.

I'm flexible and adaptable, and will be the first to admit that I don't know everything, but I know a lot, and what I know better than just about anyone is how to build high quality software systems that can scale like a mofo, do it with a small team, and do it quickly.

For example, I know that you cannot build good software efficiently if you have to have a checklist of literally hundreds of documents that are required for you to progress through a rigid waterfall model, such that even the smallest project requires a full time BA and PM, even before you get to architects, tech leads, developers, testers, etc. In every project on earth, you learn something about the problem domain along the way, and steering a project where the labor is sunk into keeping all of the "deliverables" up to date is like slaloming a supertanker. If it's not going to crash the boat, you're going to stay the course you started.

I have found it positively shameful how un-agile I've been steering a supertanker over the past several months. Primarily because I went from being the captain, the navigator, the helmsman, the route planner, the harbor pilot, and the quartermaster to being the guy who had to convince the people in those roles how to steer the supertanker, with the added obstacle of having my advice considered suspect because I wasn't from the same navy, even though their navy had such an infamous history of crashing drunkenly into icebergs and killing wildlife that they had to change their name.

If you've experienced this sort of alienation, you know whereof I speak. If not, and you are a normally ambitious person, you can imagine the frustration of being in a position you feel stuck in for financial or other reasons, but unable to pursue the things you actually enjoy doing, and are good at.

So here's my biggest problem stated clearly -- I am burned out, and I don't know what the right course of action is in the very short term. I can take a number of offers today (well, not today, because it's midnight, but you get my meaning) and work in "packaged" product dev, online service/product dev, or consulting/professional services. Every day, more offers of the same type of work that I have been doing as an independent consultant trickle in, but it's amazing how little most companies expect to spend for lead architects on large projects, so these aren't even really tempting.

It's quite possible that jumping right in and working my tail off, producing visible, measurable artifacts immediately might be the right remedy, especially because the biggest problem lately -- travel -- would no longer be a life-sucking experience twice every week. If so, I'd be well advised to take the best of the offers on the table at this time and jump in, completely gung-ho.

On the other hand, part of me wants to sit back and think about life, spending a month or two (this is for you, Goose) omphaloskeptically appraising my life, my career, and where I want to be in five years. Or, I should consider myself a lucky schmuck, stop whining, and get on with it. The problem is that this is largely mental masturbation, and I should have been doing this evaluation and planning all along. I know where I want to be in five years, I just need to figure out what the best steps are to get from here to there.

1. It's shocking, and not so shocking. Gone would be self-employment taxes, quarterly income tax filing, health insurance, unpaid time off, contract negotation and extensions, any unpaid T&L expenses, etc., that eat into that gross figure.

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