End of the Year

Had Neil over here for the week before Xmas, it was so good to see him but I barely got to spend any time with him due to work overload. Due to my improper time management he almost missed his plane home (I'm guessing his bag took a different flight), but at least I managed to get him on the plane. Ted took him around for a day, so Clau and I are taking him and Katie out for dinner tonight. Incidentally, we still owe Sam and Matt a dinner for Sam's referral money.
Apparantly we're hosting a NYE party on Sunday - I actually like that, although anyone who wants to get back from our place is going to have a rough time getting a cab.
Recruiter stuff has died down, which works out well for me since I've been so busy lately and wouldn't have had any time for interviewing.
Worked some really insane hours for the last few weeks in an effort to get a new search platform out the door in 2006. I'm actually pretty surprised that we pulled it off.
Lately I'm so tired, all I want to do is sleep for about 16 hours. So, most likely there will not be any cool insights from me coming up until 2007.

Happy New Year, everyone!

For love or money

I've noticed that I'm not very good at being a "company man". I have my own life and generally I expect a good work/life balance from my job. When a crunch comes, I expect that I'll be working some long days (or weeks), and I'm OK with that. When I have a situation in my personal life, I expect it the company to be able to bend the other way and allow me the extra time I need to get it dealt with. When the two come at the same time, I expect the company to respect that - I suppose that the compromise would be to work normal hours with maybe a tiny bit extra thrown in where possible.
So, I'm in a situation where I have stuff going on at home - I had my family's annual Xmas party last weekend, and my little brother is visiting me for a week here; he's really stepped up and improved his grades, and when asked what he might like for a reward, the only thing he wanted was to come visit me in NYC. On the work side, I've been handed some very high-profile projects that were already ridiculously late with the task of saving them and getting them out the door by the end of the year. As a result, I've been working until midnight most nights, and needless to say I haven't gotten a lot of time with my brother. I also got a big ration of shit for taking off at 3pm on Friday to make the plane, and for not being around on the weekend. And the thing that amazes me about this is that nobody seems to care.
Which got me thinking - I'm not getting anything out of all this overtime. I'm not going to get a big bonus, I'm not going to get a raise, I'm not up for a promotion - so why am I doing it? Which made me wonder, why is everyone else doing it? I can only guess that my managers have some sort of monetary incentive if everything goes out on time, whereas I'm just told to work longer and harder. Many of my coworkers are working crazy hours and don't seem to be complaining, but I think they're "company men", whereas I'm really not. I fancy myself as more of a mercenary: I do it for the plunder, and I do it well. If you want to really piss me off, make me work a lot more for no extra benefit. For bonus angry points, wait until around the holidays when I (just like everyone else) have a bunch of shit going on; family, shopping, vacation, etc. There's nothing like that combo to make an employee start calling headhunters.
I guess it comes down to (for me, at least) a simple reciprocal relationship: as my employer, if you treat me with respect, then I'll do the same. If you treat me like a "resource" (a word that, when used as a euphemism for "person", never fails to grate on my nerves), then that's how I'll act. At the very least my boss could offer me something, but I know he won't, because there's nothing in it for him.
Personally, I think that treating your employees that way is bad in the long run, because it eliminates all sense of loyalty. A lot of people stick around in their jobs because they worry that the company will suffer without them (even though they're usually mistaken about that), or out of some sense of loyalty. When the company makes it clear that they don't care about the employees, the employees usually go somewhere else.
This wasn't written very well, mostly because I wanted to post something and I wanted to write about this in particular, but for the reasons mentioned above I don't have much time to do it. But, hopefully, I got my message out.

Company_A Happenings

I guess that in some other posts I've been saying "there's lots happening at Company_A and I'll write about it soon", but I haven't really updated. So, let's get into it:
1) Company_A has been working on a very large project. I don't want to get into what it is (not sure if I can legally get into it), but suffice it to say that it involves some very expensive products, a large team of consultants, and just about everybody in the tech area of the organization from both sides of the house (consumer-oriented and professional-oriented). The consumer side of the house has taken a serious beating for the last six months or so, with a few people having absolutely lost any hope they might have had of a life outside of work. Fortunately, this doesn't include me at the moment, but my day in the barrel is coming.
2) Two people from my group have left - this is out of a group that's only made up of seven people. I can guarantee that at least one more will be leaving within a month.
3) Most of the senior developers have left.

Right now I wouldn't call it a sinking ship - I'd more call it a revolving door. There's people coming and going at a high rate, and for every person that leaves, there's another one coming in before the first fellow's seat has gone cold.

As a result of the people in my group leaving, I now have many more projects than before. Naturally, I have to play catch-up with all of them, since I'm going into mostly unfamiliar territory with most of them. I will probably be very unhappy with the workload in a few weeks, but to be honest it feels good to just be doing something in the Linux world; I've spent the last few months focusing on a video project that's all Windows-based, and mostly it's been pretty dull with a lot of drudgery. I had one good opportunity to learn some Windows scripting, but it came at a bad time (I didn't really have any time to commit to it), so I cheated and installed Cygwin, then wrote a bash script to deal with it.

I could write a long list of gripes about Company_A (you know I could do that, since I'm such a big fan of gripe lists), but suffice it to say that I'm not happy and I don't see that changing in the future. Actually, it's more like the relationship I had before I met Clau - I liked her, there was nothing wrong with her per se, and I could see myself being with her for another five years, but I knew she wasn't right for me. It broke my heart to break up with her, but I knew it was the right thing to do. I'm not unhappy with Company_A, but it's not (and never was) the right place for me, and it's time to do the right thing. Two days ago I bit the bullet and called my recruiter. I spent yesterday fixing up my resume - from what I wrote about it, you would think I've been having a blast at Company_A; my list of completed projects looks varied and impressive. For the next gig, I'm going to either go with "big fish in a little pond" or "little fish in a big pond". There are benefits to both - big fish allows me to move my skills in some different directions, whereas little fish allows me to hone my craft and eventually work towards "big fish in a big pond".

So, those are the big developments in my working life. Personal life is basically the same as it was - the big news is that Clau and I are going to the Bay Area for our annual visit and my grandmother's famous Xmas party - Clau's brother is also in the Bay Area, so now we have even more folks that we have to divide our attentions among. I'm very much looking forward to finally meeting my little sister, and I'm also going to get to see Adrian that weekend (who I haven't seen since last Thanksgiving in Missouri). After that, we're taking the redeye on Sunday night back to NY, and Neil is coming with us and staying for the week - we really have to look up some stuff for him to do (and make sure he brings appropriate clothing - it's getting really cold).

Hopefully I'll have another update before the holidays...

Techie career planning

I'm going to state a fact that (almost) every techie like me has to come to grips with: you can't have a career as a techie.
Sure, you can spend 10-20 years doing what I'm doing and enjoying it, but eventually it'll be time to meet your techie maker. This is a young man's game; it demands fast thinking in a high-pressure environment, knowledge and familiarity with emerging technologies, and an above-average dedication to the job. Eventually you simply get too old to do it.
So, how do most people work around this? Some go into the managerial track, which actually has a career path and some semblance of stability once you pass the age of 35 or so. Some go for higher and higher levels of specialization and salary, in hopes that they'll have enough to retire on when they become dinosaurs. I've been leaning towards the second option, since management has never held much appeal for me, but to be honest I've been trying not to think about it. Fortunately, I have a backup plan in my wife, who loves corporate life and will become a great success by the time I need to be put out to pasture.
I was talking with Matt last weekend, and he presented a third, interesting option: take the entrepreneurial track. Work on independent projects in your spare time and see where they go. Some may end up being just another untouched open-source project, but some may turn into the kind of thing that lots of people would want to work on and try out. You may even hit the jackpot and discover that you've created a product or service that lots of companies want and are willing to pay for (or, alternately, that a similar company views as competition and wants to purchase).
So, Matt and I got into a long conversation about it. He recently noticed that Prosper has opened up a lot of their data and will be creating an API (basically a bunch of pre-configured ways to talk to prosper.com and do things without using the website). Matt wants to write some apps to help us decide on the best loans to bid on, and maybe release it to the general public if it works well for us. Also Matt considered writing a sniping tool, which would be cool. This one probably wouldn't ever become a profitable item, but it would a nice trial run.

Fish on Thanksgiving

Clau and I went to Aruba for the Thanksgiving week - it was a good way to get some time to ourselves with a limited number of vacation days. I don't think we'll be going back there - it has the advantage of being (relatively) nearby and environmentally unspoiled, but other than that the whole damn island feels like one big tourist trap. I'm guessing that the population when we were there was probably equal parts tourists and locals (and probably swings to the tourist side during the winter months). Overall I did get what I wanted: beach, tropical drinks, a little time to get reacquainted with my wife, etc. However, there were many things that I didn't like and why I wouldn't recommend Aruba to my friends. In my usual fashion, I've compiled a list of gripes:

• Every hotel and some of the restaurants automatically add a "service charge" to the bill. In hotels, this charge gets tacked onto _everything_, from the restaurant to the spa to the coffee cart in the lobby. Unprovoked, they will go to great lengths to explain to you that it's not a gratuity. It really started to piss us off after awhile. After that experience, I understand how Clau feels about taxes in restaurants in the U.S. (in Brazil, taxes are included in the menu price, so end up spending what you think you'll be spending). Of course, the "service charge" is even worse - you could make an argument either way on including the tax in the price, but it's something that the restaurant has to pay to the government no matter what - it's just a matter of factoring it into the listed price or not; what these hotels are doing is setting a price, then asking for 15% more on top of that price for no apparent reason, then expecting a tip on top of it. I should also mention that the prices are roughly equivalent to NYC (although the quality is generally sub-NY).
• Everything is geared towards Americans. Perhaps this seems like an odd gripe, but when I go to another country, I like to feel like I'm actually in another country. The fact that every transaction takes place in English with prices in dollars takes away from some of that charm - especially when the prices are just as expensive as home.
• It's way too difficult to find good fish. This place is an island with lots of local fish, yet nobody seems interested in serving it. Of course, that's partly due to the last point; Americans don't generally like fresh fish (you can argue with me on that one, but most common ingredient on every menu was beef, and it probably wasn't because it's easier or cheaper to get in Aruba than fish). We tried to eat fish the whole time, and 50% of the time it was a disappointment.
• Although there seems to be very low unemployment in Aruba, almost everyone is employed by something for tourists (i.e. in a hotel or restaurant). In other words, their entire economy seems to involve other people coming to the island and spending money, as opposed to generating their own money and goods. There are very few (if any) aspiring entrepreneurs or small business owners there. As a result, nobody seemed to have any money of their own. One of the many consequences of no local businesses is that we didn't find any "local" restaurants (and we looked!). I was hoping to find a hole in the wall with the smell of seafood and the sound of families speaking Papiamento coming out - as far as I can tell that place doesn't exist, or else it's extremely well hidden from the gringos.
• The Radisson (where we stayed) was extremely structured; you had to sign up for everything, and the times were pretty limited. Breakfast is from 7-10:30, lunch is from 12-2, etc. Not that the food in the restaurant was terribly good anyway. Clau started referring to it as "camp". Oddly enough the best breakfast we had was on our last day - we ordered room service, got a ton of food, it was better than the food we had in the restaurant (although it was probably the same kitchen, so maybe we just got lucky) and cheaper as well. Go figure.
• The Radisson also screwed up our bill. We knew we had booked some kind of special or discount, but we didn't bring the reservation paper with us (hey, we were on vacation!). When we got the bill slipped under the door the night before checkout, there were some charges on it that we knew we hadn't made, and there was no discount of any kind. We went and asked the front desk about it that night (it was admittedly 11pm or so) and they said that they would have to leave a note for the accounting department. The nice man at the front desk wrote down our request on the bill and put the bill in the accounting department's inbox. We decided to follow up early the next morning before breakfast, and - surprise! - the note had magically disappeared overnight and nobody professed to know anything about it. The woman working at the front desk said that it would take about an hour for the accounting department to put together our receipts. I wanted to go back to the room and have some breakfast, but Clau pointed out that the front area would soon be packed with people checking out, and if we didn't stand over them and watch then the "accounting" simply wouldn't get done until it was too late (and really, shouldn't all the receipts for a given room already be together, if for no other reason than to assuage guests who fear they may have been wrongfully charged?). I sighed and admitted that she was probably right. So, we waited for an hour an a half, until finally we were presented with the reciepts. Sure enough, two of them were obviously not ours (names and signatures didn't match, although the room number did). The "accountant" (actually the same woman who was working the front desk) removed the fraudulent charges from our bill, and upon request discovered that we had in fact booked a $100 discount (which, as my father says, had been "conveniently forgotten"), and took that off. All in all, the bill went down about $200, and all it cost was our last three hours of vacation.

Of course, there are some good points:

• Very safe - I've spent a lot of my time in Brazil looking over my shoulder. Aruba is an extremely safe place. Hell, there was one mysterious disappearance and it made headlines for weeks.
• Unspoiled beaches. Turquise water and white sand everywhere. Absolutely gorgeous. Even better if you put blinders on and ignore all the fat, loud, pasty people around you (I don't fall into this demographic because I'm not loud).
• Beautiful weather - damn hot, but it's always windy so it doesn't feel crazy hot. Bring sunscreen if you're a paleface like me.
  
• Fresh fish - if you can find it.
• Really good drinking water. All of it comes from a desalination plant, which means that it's basically seawater that's turned into steam, re condensed, then filtered. Very, very clean.
  
• Balashi beer - local beer from Aruba, made with the same water. Surprisingly good (and I'm a beer snob).
• Casinos - if that's your thing. Of course, it's nothing like Vegas, but the blackjack's pretty good - $5 minimums and nobody seemed to give a shit about me counting cards (of course, that could also be because I lost anyway).
• Friendly locals, most of whom speak English. The few who didn't speak English spoke Spanish (and my guess is that they're generally immigrants from Venezuela or Ecuador), so we were never unable to communicate. Everyone who you need to interact with (cab drivers, waiters, etc) speaks English.
• Although the Radisson definitely wasn't worth it, the Spa is very, very good. Clau and I got massages and it really felt like a first-class kind of Spa (or course, it also wasn't cheap - more than $200 for a "couple's massage", but it's the only thing in the Radisson that's really worth the money).
  

So, overall, it was just what we wanted but there's a myriad of reasons why we won't go back.
Lots going on at Company_A, I'll write all about that soon.