My vacation starts in two days. I’m going to Florida and I’m hoping to tour the Everglades, drink piña coladas, and get some writing done. More than anything I don’t want to think about work, but this week isn’t helping much. The farce – of course – continues and I still have not quite figured out what my problem is but I’m getting a clearer picture day by day.
Incentive. Economics, whether it be behavioral or classical, revolves around it. At a core, economics is a study of how much it takes to incentive someone to do something or buy something. Where does the line of input equal the desired output and what are those values.
The trouble with my work is that the line is a moving target and always getting farther. This is partially economic – health care rates are higher and pay is stagnant, meaning real income is lower. A small raise is a small incentive – a small pay cut is a massive disincentive and the more ambitious the person (ie me) the steeper the decline.
This is compounded by the organizational realities of the environment. My former boss was faux-IT, a fake but in my field. I did not respect his competency but his ineptitude empowered my success if only to reveal him for the charlatan he really was. My current boss is non-IT. Her background is different, her knowledge base foreign. Mismatches in priority, approach, conclusions of cost-benefit and power positioning are all different. It’s a tension that can be productive, but is always nerve-wracking especially at this level. It’s one thing for a thrice-high IT manager to deal with outside approaches and another thing for a down in the trenches administrator to have to straddle technical, political, and business all with the same handful of sentences.
That alone, however, is easily accommodated. – at least my new boss is generally competent, tactful, and well-respected The worse reality however is simply the lesson of my employment – no matter what one does, no matter how hard one works, no matter what promises are made – nothing ever gets better. It doesn’t matter how many projects one takes on, it doesn’t matter how well one presents themselves, or how much training one receives, no matter what happens fate is capricious and obtuse. Am I pessimist? For life. Have I ever considered the world fair? No, I’m older than age six. Do still feel slighted? Absolutely. I did my job and then four times that. What did I get for it? Less authority, less autonomy, and the honor of implementing disagreeable policies. And the worst part is that things haven’t necessarily even gone that differently than if I had run them. It’s the same shit but having my own plans re-suggested to me just leaves my mouth dry, my throat feeling like rust, and the nearest window looking faster than the stairs.
Sad thing is – I had a plan. I did. I knew all of this was going to happen. It became the reality months ago. Maybe I was the only one who saw it.
My plan was simple. The moment they fired my boss I was going to quit. Right then. The very same day. That was my opportunity. Right at that moment I had everything – a perfect reputation and as much authority as I was ever going to have. Sure I would have been the opportunistic prick but at least I could define my terms. Maybe that would mean leaving, maybe that would mean something else, but I’d have gotten to create the world in which I intended to work. Instead I played the coward, waited it out, and lost the opportunity.
And so I keep waiting. The farce will wrap itself up soon enough. Another year and change before I graduate. What then? Not sure, but there’ll be no point in hanging around my current employment once I have an MBA. They already underpay the position and there aren’t any future opportunities.
So about that vacation!
I’ve got two books to read: The Continental Op by Dashiell Hammet and The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick Brooks. The former is hard-boiled detective fiction. The latter is a book of essays on managing large-scale IT development. Both are fiction for me and I’ll enjoy them in equal measure.
Outside of that my writing is going well enough. I’ve skimmed some of my chapters drafts and they need a lot of editing but that was to be expected. At least I’m getting words on the page.
Finally: the two most interesting pictures on the internet: Boxing top down & The Beatles playing the crowd a few hours earlier. (Entertainment for the boxing match.)
Enjoy.
