Love or Money?
mindrobots
Posts: 6,506
I'm having a mid-life career crises and I'm just curious.
Good job, good money but I absolutely can't stand what I'm doing and I've worked myself into Golden Handcuffs.
I do it strictly for the money and have a list of other things that I'd like to be doing but being the only income funding the American Dream (mortgage, cars, wife, kid, etc.) well, the drudgery continues.
Older
No Degree
Rather narrow job description - BIG, BIG corporation, tiny little function.
Limited documented marketable skills
24 years of service
5 weeks vacation
Good pay
Good location
Good job, good money but I absolutely can't stand what I'm doing and I've worked myself into Golden Handcuffs.
I do it strictly for the money and have a list of other things that I'd like to be doing but being the only income funding the American Dream (mortgage, cars, wife, kid, etc.) well, the drudgery continues.
Older
No Degree
Rather narrow job description - BIG, BIG corporation, tiny little function.
Limited documented marketable skills
24 years of service
5 weeks vacation
Good pay
Good location
Comments
Got to many bills to do anything drastic.
It pays okay, but the work environment is great. Great people, great boss. It makes up for the average pay.
I could make more working other places, but I would probably end up hating my job.
Bean
Between the proverbial rock and hardplace I am.
But when I hit my own mid-life crisis i want one of these...
Everyone needs a backup plan, ie alternate employment, if & when layoffs come. Do yourself a favor, always look around for the bigger better deal, or a lifeboat job to keep your options open. If you happen to find greener grass in the process, you can decide if jumping ship is the right thing to do. Obviously keep working hard in your current job until such time comes.
My own confidential personal robot project (development, patent, and shopping it around) is a very pleasant diversion which "keeps hope alive" that I might make some money someday soon. I've met a few bigwigs along the way (Dean Kamen, Colin & Helen at iRobot) and they agree I'm on the right path. A highly recommended escape route for anyone IMHO: steer your hobby towards making money. It won't always happen, but if you can see some light at the end of the tunnel, you'll keep making progress towards it.
Perform 6 - 9 month capacity planning for Enterprise wide SAN Storage, SAN switches and NAS
Current environment about 1500 storage frames with 182PB of raw storage across 59 data centers (about 20 major data centers); 112 SAN fabrics with about 180,00 SAN ports
3 of us do the capacity planning, there are other groups that do project design and planning, operations, technology planning, ordering and installation, lab work, R&D
Every 2 months, we purchase storage so we determine how much and where it needs to go based on usage trends, special project needs, etc.
There's a BIG spreadsheet I feed with data from various places - that drives our decisions. We also maintain and feed some of the data tools that end up feeding this spreadsheet and generate various reports to describe this growing environment and justify why we need to buy more storage every 2 months.
I don't touch the storage, interact with it in any way. Require little technical knowledge about it and therefore require no technical training or skill development. We do on occasion get to develop tools to scrub, report on or otherwise manipulate the data (perl, SQL, Excel, Powerpoint). We also of course attend all the conference calls to steer our way through the corporate bureaucracy.
Basically, track and forecast widgets, weigh the project needs for widgets against budget $'s. It could be storage, it could be nuts and bolts, most any consumable commodity within a company.
A long long time ago, I used to write operating system code for Sperry (Unisys) which ran on their mainframes.....I used to do Fly & Fix for hardware and OS problems....I used to do network design and costing...now I count widgets to make sure we have enough but don't have too many sitting around unused for too long a period. Now that planning job is even less challenging because you bring the storage into a data center in chunks of 300-500TB at a time.
Professional Widget counter..that's me!!
However, I would hire you in a minute to write documentation if I had the means. Maybe you should consider free-lance writing?
Why not become a widget maker?
If I were you, I'd find a way to start hanging out in the R&D department more, assuming that's of interest. Get noticed, do a side project for them that will win some friends and make you invaluable there. Engineer yourself a lateral move within the company and you're sitting pretty, keeping all your same benefits.
Sweet! Great avatar too.
Time to make another robot if you ask me.
This is exactly what I did. Computers were just a hobby for me in the early 90's. I started networking salvaged 286 systems in my garage. By 1998 I left the day job and started out on my own. Great time to do it, just 2 years before the Y2K farce!!!! Made a killing in 1999. I have been doing it ever since and also added CCTV to the mix. I am by no means rich, but I live knowing I am doing something good for others and I meet a ton of great people along the way.
I'm NOT volunteering for anything!!
Thanks! I'd hire a bunch of us on the forums if I had the means...not sure what kind of work we'd get done but the water cooler conversation would be AMAZING with the group I have in mind!!
Free-lance?? I'd never work for someone like me!!
-Phil
It seems like even doing something you really, really love gets to be boring after a while. I used to be a porn star living in Southern Cal, but every day it was the same old thing - a couple of gorgeous chicks, lunch and dinner at the most expensive restaurants, fine wines, fast cars, money to burn, royalty checks and fan mail coming in from all over the world. But it got boring after a while, so I turned to drugs and alcohol to prop me up, and next thing you know I woke up in a back alley somewhere covered in vomit, bruises on my face, a couple of teeth missing, and an engineering degree in my broken fist. It all happened so fast.
Nowadays I remain a perpetually penniless research drudge just to stay out of trouble.
-Phil
What I do now is fairly social at times, travel at times, service work, IT, training / education / writing at times... I enjoy the mix less these days, I guess. Makes things hard and less manageable.
Greattt now its gonna rain here ... sheeseh Phil .
Serious where is this PNW rain the locals speak of ... I am dryyyy here :cool:
Since my hobbies have always involved electronics, my work and play co-mingle quite often and both have benefited from the other. However, for that reason as well, I also keep them very separate to prevent any conflicts of interest from either direction.
I'd like to try self-employment, but I heard the boss is an idiot.
Machines don't poop, pee, or puke on you. They don't complain, curse, or second guess you (nor do they rat me out or file a complaint if I do). They present with a rather narrow range of symptoms and do not require that many special tools though most of us have wanted the head of the guy who designed it to require major surgery to get to a stupid fuse. If I should fry a part, I simply replace it, the machine runs like new, and it will never sue me. How much better does it get? And no school loans 5* my mortgage!!! Well, except maybe the DeVry guys out there....
I'm reasonably good at the things I love, enough to be able to support my family. If something happened where I became suddenly wealthy, I'd probably lean more heavily on the educational side of the two businesses I run, and less on the monetary side. Outside of that, there is a very high likelihood that I would do pretty much the same stuff I do now, only with more frequent breaks.
Jeff
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/top-five-personality-traits-employers-120509955.html
I would take a job to pay the bills so that I could do what I do now...
Do you have requirements? [Answer: Yes. Me: OK]
Do you have tests that prove the requirements? [Answer: Yes. Me: OK]
Do the results that show the tests proved the requirements? [Answer: Yes. Me: OK]
And I write everything down. Its completely awesome when it works, it makes it almost impossible to have "stoopid" errors in the code and docs. When I do it for money, I get paid way too much; and when I do it for free, I work way too long. Its great.
However, there are always folks that try to write code without requirements, or release without testing, or otherwise skip a bunch of critical stuff "to meet the schedule". And then get offended when I have to record these decisions. Invariably, the decision to skip doing an extra day of work "in order to meet the schedule tomorrow" results in missing the final delivery by weeks or months, and a crappy unreliable product in the field that impossible to support. My function typically gets grief for this coming and going, since its my job to record and report these things. Normally, I wouldn't mind, folks can lie in what ever bed they make; but when we're dealing with aircraft or medical devices, innocent folks can get killed. It gets difficult seeing these otherwise smart people repeating the same mistakes and giving themselves ulcers, in spite of their own processes and data; and putting others at risk. That parts gets old.
For a while I thought I was getting old and cynical, since it found myself labeling a significant portion of co-workers "maroons". A friend said, "You haven't lost you ability to reasonably deal with people, you have learned from experience how to identify the Shinola".
I figure, whats the point of being rich and smart if you don't have any fun? From now on, if I have to work for a selfish, greedy, narrow minded, unreasonable SOB, his name is going to be ME.
-Phil
Marry for the money. The love will come later *grin*.