thirdbIT

Here we are, in Internet Boom 2.0. As they are fond of saying on Battlestar Galactica, “all of this has happened before; all of this will happen again.” Join a fabulous startup, get rich quick. Take your dogs to work. We have a work hard, play hard atmosphere, and all the free $junk_food you can eat. Just completed our second round of funding.

And so goes the business cycle.

Meanwhile, how do we figure out what we want to do? We can do many things. We could advertise ourselves as general all-around techie problem-solvers, but isn’t that a bit vague? A friend with an interactive agency keeps trying to convince us to learn ActionScript 3. We keep trying to get it up for the idea, but we just can’t. If one of us could, the other could go along, but neither of us can.

We wouldn’t call ourselves expert at anything. We’re generalists by temperament, and by circumstance. It’s harder and harder to be a specialist these days: you start specializing, and your specialty goes overseas, or out-of-style. Or someone discovers that you are great at requirements analysis and there you are, talking to users, when what you wanted to learn to do better was write code.

On the other hand, our non-specialist skills are a lot better than many people’s specialties. I keep thinking my skills must be a bit rusty, given that I’ve been working mostly as a hausfrau for a couple of years now. Then a friend will tell me some story about how he discovered that the reason someone’s code was running so slow is that it was making a ton of completely unnecessary database calls. And I think, “well, duh.” Which reminds me that actually, I may not be up-to-date on my technologies, but I’m not, fundamentally, a dumbass. Which a disturbing number of software developers are. I like solving problems with code. I like solving problems with other peoples’ code even better. I like working with other people to solve problems with code. And I like working with people to solve their problems without code. And finding out exactly what problem they’re trying to solve when they come to me with some ill-conceived notion about some code they want me to write.

In general, I’m remembering how much I truly enjoyed writing software.

Which, getting back to figuring out what I’m passionate about, should tell me that even though I write great documents, I don’t want work that’s just about writing documents. I want work where I get to write code.

When I was a kid, I thought I’d be a novelist when I grew up. I was very sure of that. In college I instead became very sure that I would be a university professor, an anthropologist. My friend Nitzan and I would start a new school of thought, neo-structuralism. It would be all the rage. We would be incomprehensible and profound.

I ended up writing code because Max thought I’d like it. I don’t think he thought I’d end up a software developer. Who knows what it means to end up anything, anyway, these days, when everyone tells us to be flexible and expect to have a dozen different careers in our lives. What does ‘career’ even mean in those circumstances? Actually, what did career ever mean? Max’s father says that the whole concept of a career, as we think of it, was invented in the 70s to get more unpaid work out of white-collar employees. It’s not enough to put in our hours at the office – we also have to advance our careers. We do this not just by putting in extra hours, but by having an advertorial online presence. We have to brand ourselves and then sell sell sell. I resent this. Working on a SafeForWork blog, building my online brand, networking… there are so many things I’d really rather do with my time. And yet.

One must have money.

So I consider my brand. I consider Max’s brand. I think about what **our** brand would be, the secret that would make hiring us, as more than two minds (a *bit* more, you see), attractive.

When I figure it out, I’ll be sure to let you know.