It's been quiet here for a few weeks while the work situation has settled out some. I'll be rectifying that shortly.

(heh, I said rectify.)

I've been trying to write this post now for a good two weeks. This is probably draft number four or so so hopefully I've got it right this time. The tone of the article has changed over time from lecture hall to soapbox preacher and now I've finally settled on righteous indignation; I'm comfortable here and hopefully it serves to drive the point home. -Mike

First things first: let me start by telling you who I am NOT talking about. I am not talking about the homeless, the unfortunate, the downtrodden, the Girl Scouts, the Shriners, or the poor. I'm not saying that each of these are not worthy causes, or that they don't do great things. They do. Who I am talking about, is you. Yes. you. All of you reading this, but you in particular. Don't look behind you because there's no one there. I'm talking to you so pay attention. I'm writing about this nasty little trend of "my life is not my fault", aka the Cult of No Responsibility, that seems to be taking over our society. It's time to quit being whiny wonders and start taking responsibility for both the good and the bad parts of your life. It can be overt or it can be insidious; it can be intentional or unknowing, but one way or another everyone out there (including you and me) have at some point tried to escape blame for something. I'm here to say stop. Stoppit right now.

It's sometimes difficult to know when you're one of these people. Quite often it takes a dramatic life event to shake your world view enough to make you realize what you're doing. Mine happened in 2004; I ended up spending 10 days in jail because I was basically a dumbass. I went through life running from my problems instead of taking care of them and tried to hide. When everything finally caught up to me I had time to sit, figure out what I was doing wrong, and decide how to fix it. Ever since then my personal mantra has been that you can't take credit for your successes without also taking credit for your failures. If I see the former without the latter I'm immediately on my guard in either a personal or professional setting. On the flip side of this, you can go too far and be paralyzed by the "it's all my fault" syndrome. I've made a list here of the little rules that I've learned over the last six years so hopefully it helps someone out by posting it here too.

• Nearly everything in your life is under your direct control. Events themselves may not be results of your direct choice, but 99% of the time you made a choice that put you on this path.
• Understand that while your choices put you in a situation, your choices can also take you out of it too. Sure, your sucky life may be all your fault and you know it. But as you put yourself there you have to be the one to pull yourself out too.
• Admit your mistakes. People will generally help you work through it and you'll probably learn something new to boot. This generally only works once per person. Abuse it and you'll lose what friends and family you have left.
• If you DO make a mistake, don't try to cover it up. It invariably backfires and you look worse than ever.
• There is no such thing as luck. I have heard so many times how lucky I am. Let's set the record straight: I was not born clutching a winning lottery ticket. I grew up strictly low-middle middle class. My dad often worked multiple jobs to provide for us, and my mom worked too as soon as we were old enough. My sisters and I worked around the house, had jobs as soon as we turned 16, and were expected to bring home good grades too. Everything I'm good at today, from my job expertise to my friend making ability to my fitness level I've had to work my ass off for. The only thing in life that I've EVER had without working for is my limited ability to draw.
• There is no such thing as talent. There IS such a thing called inclination. Nature and nurture can combine together in weird ways to give someone a formative edge over someone else in niche xyz. The biggest thing that comprises that which is commonly referred to as talent is "time vested". Also known as practice. Using my ability to draw I mentioned above, it's nothing more than a trick of good hand / eye coordination, my brain acts like a photocopy machine. To this day I can't sit down and draw things out of my head.
• The expedient thing and the right thing are seldom the same thing.
• You HAVE to try new things. Always. How else do you know what you'll enjoy? I'm horrible at writing but I keep plugging away here because it's cathartic, and I think I'm getting better. My website traffic is going up to, so that seems to be a good sign.

Further good reads on this topic:
How to be Resilient - Part 1 : The Art of Manliness
Bosting Your Resiliency - Part 2 : The Art of Manliness

So what brought all this on? It's a long story at this point but I've discovered it's not an uncommon phenomenon in the tech world. Whether your IT or IS (ie, computer guy or programmer), there is such a wealth of knowledge and specialization that it's easy to be tempted to cover your mistakes. IT in general is a high pressure career vs the old days circa 2000; no longer gods, IT people are leashed to the MBAs of the world and can't treat everyone as a "n00b". There will always be someone better and/or cheaper than you, so at the end of the day it's your people skills and respect that are the ONLY things that will save you (and your job).

Between staying late a few nights and gym after work, I haven't had time to finish my latest masterpiece.

Check back tomorrow.

The important thing is this: To be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become. - Charles DuBois

This quote holds a pretty deep meaning for me. I came across it late last summer when I started to get antsy with life in Mobile. It made me think long and hard on both what I had achieved and what I wanted out of life. This single quote opened up the realization that my future, for good or for ill, was in my hands and my hands alone. My happiness was MY responsibility, not anyone elses, and if I wasn't happy then it was my own damn fault. Throughout the next year that theme was repackaged and re-presented to me over and over in a variety of ways until I finally accepted it.

While I realized I wanted something to change, I had no idea what or where. Being the logical person I am I went through a period of self examination trying to determine what exactly I was dissatisfied with. My friends and family? No,they were fine. My job? Nope, I pretty much liked everyone I worked with. My work? Well, it had its up and downs. High stress for sure. My city? Uh..it's a paved over swamp. With climate and wildlife to match. Bingo.

About this same time my boss Jeff sent around a little career guide book to his managers; if you haven't read The Adventures of Johnny Bunko I highly recommend it. It's written in a pseudo-English manga style in an effort to "connect" to all us Gen X/Y'ers out there but if you can get past the medium it's got 6 lessons to take away:

1. There is no plan.
2. Think strengths, not weaknesses
3. It’s not about you.
4. Persistence trumps talent.
5. Make excellent mistakes.
6. Leave an imprint.

The idea was these would apply to your career, but honestly it works for your life too. #1 hit me hard; here I was struggling and trying to plan my life and happiness and it just wasn't working. Once I quit planning and just ..."did", everything else seemed to fall into place. I realized life doesn't come with a roadmap or a GPS. You can't pick your destination and see a nice little print out of the choices that will get you there. You can only simply start driving. Every road you take (or not) gets you somewhere (or not), so if you don't like where you are, choose better next time. The more times you do it the better sense of direction you get, the better you ask for directions, the quicker you find your goals. Like #5 says; make excellent mistakes right?

I doubt my boss intended for the book to have quite the impact on me it did. We had discussed the topic of job stress levels in the past and why I wasn't happy, but to be honest I hadn't figured it out for myself. Once I knew that it was my environment outside of work, I knew it had to change. I had come out to San Diego the past two summers for vacation and I loved it. It had all the amenities of a large city but somehow with the feel of a small town. No matter what your interests were there was something catering to them; beaches, mountains, hiking trails, Vegas... it seemed to have it all. When the chance came to apply for my current job I almost didn't even think twice about it.

There was a good chance this would be a mistake; I was giving up a managerial position with a strong future with a stable company to become a peon again. If nothing else this would be a learning experience, an "excellent mistake" if you will, and that I (probably) wouldn't regret it. Even if it turns out to be the wrong city, I'm proud of the fact that I made this mistake well. What really got me was the fact that hardly anyone tried to talk me out of it. My closest friends and family were encouraging and supportive, and that's always helpful with these life-changing decisions.

So here I am. I've been not-so-figuratively camping out here for a little over a week now. I'm tentatively standing on my own nearly 2000 miles from everything I've known for the past 30 years. Tomorrow the rest of my stuff arrives, the last physical links to
a sense of "home". I think the real process of unpacking and settling in begins tomorrow.

That is some tasty, tasty pie you see there: apple pie ala mode with caramel sauce. Today was a pretty good day so I decided to celebrate a bit with room service.

I'm up in LA for a few days getting to meet the development teams I'll be working with and trying to absorb all the knowledge of my predecessor. I drove up yesterday evening after 8 and I gotta say; driving in LA was fun! 8 lanes of traffic, average speed of 70-80mph, and tons of traffic all dodging and weaving. It was like driving in a high speed go-kart track.

While up here, I managed to get my truck delivered ahead of schedule. The movers were in the area doing another drop off and called me to schedule the San Diego delivery. I talked them into dropping it here at the LA office instead and turned in my rental car a day early. Hurrah! It only took about 6 phone calls and twenty minutes to actually FIND the movers but we eventually did. My truck is filthy, smells like an oily boot, and the seat settings are all jacked up. But it's mine. Further fun factoids? I didn't realize until the day I drove up to LA that they only take payment in cash, money order, or cashiers check, and I'm nearly 1200 miles from my nearest bank branch. I'm probably the whitest looking person to ever appear to be doing a drug deal by giving him a wad of cash on a side street near the freeway.

After the truck trade we went up to the main Sony Pictures lot/campus in Culver City to meet some of the dev teams; we ran into them at The Commissary so we joined up for lunch. We got to hang out some afterward and see some product demos. It's a kickass experience to watch technology like this in action and to realize it's running on "my" platforms. Everyone I've met has been great so it sucks that I'll be 100 miles away and not able to be up this way more often. The eye candy wandering the Sony Pictures campus is a pretty nice fringe benefit too.

Looks I'll be heading back to San Diego a day early due to some network maintenance Thurs night / Fri morning. It looks like the rest of my belongings should be arriving this weekend too so hopefully I'm gonna be pretty busy. It'll be nice to have ...well a bed for starters. Maybe Wifecat will stop giving me dirty looks from across the room.

Food coma is catching up to me so I'm making an early night of it.

I was linked this article by a longtime friend who works at Microsoft. I read through a few times and found myself agreeing with much of it. I think it's decent set of guidelines on how to lead technical people, but I think it completely missed the contrast between working for a company that has engineering or IT at its core vs one that has sales or marketing at its core. Maybe it was supposed to? I will say it's highly unlikely to find non-technical (ie, sales/marketing) oriented companies to following the advice in the article. There's a very subtle line that shifts a company one way or another; most non-technical companies probably think they're technical at their core. My previous employer TeleVox (and by extension, West) comes to mind immediately. Hold their policies up to a company like say, Amazon or Google and you realize just how far from a technical core they are. I don't think either method is intrinsically wrong or right, but IT people need to realize what sort of company they work for and how it will affect their career path.

Startups are a shining example of this, and I've worked at my fair share of startups over the years. Ordinarily startups will start and remain technically focused until they hit it big. At this point it can go either way; Myspace and Facebook are examples of ones who (in my opinion) have a stronger marketing slant, while my favorite webhosts Dreamhost and Google are classic cases of successful startups that stayed tech focused. I wish I had been around for the founding of my previous employer TeleVox. From the stories I heard it sounded like a tech startup, but by the time I came along there was most definitely a strong sales and marketing slant. This trend only continued throughout my tenure there throughout our acquisition by West.

So what does this mean to your average IT guy or gal? Maybe not a whole lot, but here's some tidbits that I've amassed through direct experience and from second hand information from colleagues.

How to tell if your company is sales/marketing focused

• You will be praised often and loudly within your department. Just not company-wide.
• By contrast, sales people will be. They will probably also make more than you. Frequently there are reward programs for exceeding job expectations (President's Club trips, bonuses, etc). You do not get any of these for staying late to fix that database issue.
• It is very unlikely that your position or your compensation will grow and scale with your skillset. Your skillset is not directly improving the company's bottom line and that's the only thing that gets rewarded.
• Non-IT type positions don't grow (learning a new version of Word does not count!) except by years and years of experience in that role, so typically these types of companies are unable to understand how to maintain healthy, growing IT positions which grow at a much faster pace.. Constant change and growth is a requirement!
• When these companies find a technology level that works for them, it will take an act of God or Congress or both to get them to change or improve upon it.
• The IT / engineering / developer staff will only be called upon for input when a direction for the company/product/platform has been decided on. It's not uncommon for your only say is to how long it will take you to implement whatever has been dreamed up.
• Since it's so hard to directly measure your job and performance, expect to be micromanaged. If you're not micromanaged consider yourself lucky, but you'll probably instead have to attend at least two meetings a day. There is no lesser of two evils here.
• I don't care what anyone says: most Agile development processes are a form of micromanaging. With shiny stickers. Wake up developers, you are not in second grade anymore.

Due to these factors, it is vital that you change jobs/employers every 2-3 years to ensure your compensation and knowledge stay current. Technical focused companies are much easier to remain with for 5-10 years. If you're not careful the market will outpace you and it's not uncommon after 3 years for new hires to be making the same if not more than you.

If everything goes as planned, in exactly one week from today I'll be officially moved out of my apartment. My flight will leave the next morning at 11am with Wifecat and I en route to San Diego. My new apartment is rented, new utilities scheduled for hookup, old utilities scheduled for shut off, and my ticket is booked. Tomorrow I book my rental car and finalize with the movers who will be done by this time next week. My last day at TeleVox will be this Friday.

So why am I not asleep tonight? I'm almost done packing so it's not like I need to be up for that. Everything has gone smoothly despite the rushed timetable; in the past moving has been chaotic and dramatized. I honestly think this is the first time I've never had to ask for help from friends or family during a move and it makes me feel all grown-ed up inside. Yes, grown-ed up is a word. I just used it didn't I? I'm awake because I just got back from the gym and because I wanted to start recording my state of mind before the big move gets fully underway. I guess I need to remember in the future that cardio makes me introspective. Too much time with too much repetitive motion no doubt.

I've had the idea of this post in the back of my mind most of the day, struggling to put words to what I'm feeling. Strangely enough, blank is the only adjective that comes to mind. I'm excited about the idea of moving to San Diego, but I'm not overly anxious about the moving process itself or my new job. It feels like the right thing to do and somehow that's enough. I think it helps that my friends, family, and co-workers have all been supportive. I hope it didn't take me leaving to realize what a great group of people I know here in Mobile. I'm actually a little sad to be leaving TeleVox. The teams I've worked with and worked for have helped grow and shape me in the ways that made it possible for me to do this transition, so I owe them all. Thank you.

Hopefully this is the only serious post of the blog. These are a total drag.

Editor's note: It's Gollum, climbing on a lamp with a balloon. What do you want of me?

Editor's note: Another historical post. This relatively short post is deceptive. It's hard to imagine what life changing events would grow out of it.

It's no secret anymore that the company I work for has been sold, and the news has really changed the atmosphere around my department and the company as a whole. It's to be expected I suppose but that doesn't make it any more agreeable. I'm only thankful that I've been through this a time or three so I know what to generally expect. I think it's going to be an exciting opportunity for our technology to grow and I hope I'm able to remain a part of it.

Editor's note:I was rereading this post before reposting it and at first I couldn't remember what it was about. I remembered around the time I hit the second paragraph. I think it's a little melodramatic but it's still a decent piece of writing.

In the chaos of moving, holidays, and my own enlightened self interest I have stumbled; stumbled in such a manner that the myriad threads and strings that entwine to build my life were nearly tangled beyond repair. Again. It's cyclic, this endless peat(pete?) and repeat that makes up every person's life. We see in the macrocosm of history: those that ignore history are doomed to repeat it. We see it expressed again and again in religions across the globe. Reincarnation. Resurrection. Circle of Life. Recycling. How is it that I (and most people I think) fail to take note and heed the old adage of learning from our mistakes? Because I'm human I guess. It just seems that with my penchant for observing patterns and troubleshooting I'd catch on sooner. The only thing that has changed is that I can sense the upcoming knot and quietly prepare for it.

So amidst the unraveling and re-weaving of my life I realized that my biggest mistake so far was how I approached having a job. My job has always been about my passions, whether it was books or computers or animals or anything. I gave it my all and invariably got less that what I expected in return. I felt cheated. Didn't life know what I had given up for this? Why wasn't it better? I KNEW I could make it better if I just tried harder... Right? Wrong. It boils down to a simple expression. Job != life. While it's great to do something you love, and everyone really really really really should, don't let it consume you to the point where the life you have IS your job. Almost without fail, I think that has been my biggest mistake.

I came by it honestly enough I think. My dad worked a lot when I grew up, and so did my mom once we got old enough. The difference that I understand and realize now is that they worked hard for a purpose, to raise and provide for us. It replaced their lives but it was a burden they understood and undertook consciously. I emulated that I think under the guise of a "work ethic" and for no reason. I have no children, no spouse, no house to pay for. I do not need to kill myself working day in and day out. It is not asked of me, it is not expected of me, and I am not compensated to do so. In my opinion, any job that requires you to give up your life to do it had better be damned important. Armed Services or Secret Service level important. Not fix networks important.

All this has led to an epiphany of sorts. It's motivated me to make plans. Far-reaching, and almost long term. Almost. I have a lot of resolutions for this year and I haven't told a single soul what they are. I probably won't. I reevaluated. I thought. I carefully untangled threads. I began to comprehend that ambition and achievement, the scales by which I measured the meaning of my life, were useless. Using my success (or lackthereof) in a profession is a poor way to confer value on myself. I think it's time I did more to give myself value instead of looking to others for it.

Remember kids: live your life and work your job. Not the other way around.