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On Quitting My Job
“What makes you think you were doing bad work?” Asks the psychologist. Not a real one, just the call-and-response in my cranium.
“Well, there’s only so many hours a workday you can spend on Ricochet when you ought to be doing other things and still think you’re a good worker. I’m not going to sit here taking their coin forever when I’m not providing commensurate services in exchange. It’s dishonest.”
“Has your boss talked to you about this?” Pretty much the first check to perform when someone talks this way. It goes this way with depression; the disease feeds and grows off of lies you tell yourself. Maybe I’m doing bad work, maybe I’m only depressed and think they’re doing bad work.
“No, last annual review the boss man said he was pretty happy with the work I’ve been providing. Frankly, that was a surprise to me. I wasn’t happy with the value I’d been adding at that point.” The hope here is obviously that I’m lying to myself about my poor job performance. If that’s a lie then as soon as I disbelieve I can stop worrying about it, be a little happier about life, and importantly, not have to quit my job. But is it a lie?
“And your coworkers? Have they noticed anything?” Gathering more evidence.
“Noticed? Can’t say that they’ve noticed. Can’t say that they haven’t, either. Hasn’t gone far enough that anyone’s said anything, at least in my hearing. Still, I’ve left them plenty to notice.” I expect people to notice a great deal more than they let on. I assume no one’s spoken up out of a certain amount of politeness or unwillingness to stir up trouble. Or maybe they haven’t noticed; people really don’t think much about other people. Not something I’d like to presume on, however.
“So if the ‘boss man’ hasn’t told you you need to shape up, and none of your coworkers have complained about the quality of your work, what makes you think you’re doing a poor job?” And that’s the meat of the question. If I’m lying to myself then quitting the job is a large scale act of self-sabotage. If I’m not then… well, as long as we’re being honest it’s not a great scenario. You want to quit a job when you’ve got another one lined up already.
“I can measure, can’t I? This isn’t a case of ‘I feel like I’m worthless.’ This is me calculating time spent on the internet versus time spent doing something productive. This is me measuring my rate of progress on projects versus similar projects a couple of years ago, and coming up short. This is me counting the times I’ve switched from working on necessary projects to working on fun projects because at least that way I might get something done. Look, one of my assets, I’ve got an extremely logical, scientific mind. I trust my own ability to objectively evaluate these things more than anyone else’s, and that’s even taking the crazy into account.” Perhaps a touch arrogant, but I’ve been measuring my mind for years.
“Let’s take it as read that you’re right about that. What makes you think about jumping ship to any other job is going to give you better results?” A fair question. If your problem is in your head you can’t walk away from it.
“Because my job is in Industrial Engineering. Nothing against the discipline, but it ain’t me.” I may hold some things against the discipline, but nothing personal.
“When you say ‘it ain’t me…” Ah yes, the old ‘repeat the last three words back to him’ school of psychoanalysis. Hmm…
“Have you ever studied economics?” Being an inhabitant of my skull I’m going to assume she has at least a passing familiarity with the subject. “F. A. Hayek: ‘It’s the curious task of economics to show man how little he knows about what he imagines he can design.’ I believe that wholeheartedly. Industrial engineering is… not that. Working on a factory to make it more efficient, yeah, that’s great. No problem there. Modeling a factory ever more accurately in order to make predictions about the future? I don’t really believe that’s possible past a certain point, and I think our department passed that point a long time ago. Centralizing decision making around product flow in order to maximize output? Practically gives me hives thinking about it. What you’re doing is you’re assuming your model is more accurate than the real world out there, and asking people to dance to it. Just a bad idea.”
“So you have philosophical objections to the work, and that’s enough for you to quit?” Might be?
“Well, that’s not all. The other thing is I like a bit of chaos in my life. Okay, more than a bit. I’m more comfortable with disruptions to a daily routine than having a daily routine in the first place. I like unusual circumstances, I appreciate having to think on my feet and having to adapt the plan. I’m all about building capability for dealing with unforeseen circumstances. All this? Anathema to the Industrial Engineering mindset. It’s inefficient. I’m not knocking that way of thinking; it’s very useful when you’re looking to maximize a factory. I’m just built wrong for it.”
“When you say you’re built wrong—“
“Not in a ‘woe is me, why did God make me broken like this?’ sense. The Good Lord built me the way I am for a purpose. That purpose doesn’t seem to be Industrial Engineering. I’m just slotted into the wrong category in the working world.” Honest truth. I try very hard to understand the different ways people’s minds work, what motivates them, what they enjoy, how they play the game. I should have a decent idea of how my motivations work by now.
“Okay, okay. You’re set on quitting your job. Why not wait a bit, find a different, a better job on the side, and only make your jump when you know you’ll stick the landing?”
“Because I have been waiting a bit. I’ve been waiting too long already. I’ve weighed and dissected the question. And the longer I stay at this job the worse I do. Job-hunting without already being employed makes that game harder. But job-hunting, while employed, is proving impossible. I’ve spent so much of my energy by the end of the workday, by the end of the workweek, that I just can’t handle the emotional Hindenburg that’s the job hunt.”
“Okay, let’s say you get another job. What does it look like?” Now there’s the sixty-four thousand dollar question.
Just a quick note: This is, as they say, based on a true story. I quit my job, I don’t have another one lined up yet. While the long term prospects of shiftless bumming are sour, in the meantime I’ve got plenty of seed corn to eat. I’m confident that I’ll be able to get a better job, just as soon as I figure out what that better job is. Is highwayman still a valid profession?
Published in Economics
But don’t call them.
They’ll call you.
It’s like writing poetry…
…
…
no money in it.
But you get to kill Communists. That’s a high.
Actually, one can make money at poetry. I haven’t tried killing communists. Maybe there is money in that, too.
See Eating Raoul. Take their cash, watches, jewelry, phones, etc. Sell their cars. And drop off the corpses at the dog food factory.
Deaned.
Have you considered applying for a job with Ricochet? I gather the pay’s not very good, but at least it would resolve your dilemma about spending too many working hours here.
Amen. Fought that fight for almost 30 years. Mixed results.
My first job as a very junior consultant was like this. The client had purchased the source code from the programmer (who had left their employ and taken it with him) and wanted to make some enhancements.
It was undocumented FORTRAN.
The best kind of FORTRAN, to be sure.
Especially if it has variable names limited to six characters or less. And plenty of GOTO statements.
I took a FORTRAN class in high school.
Thankfully, no one has ever asked me to do anything in it since.
But the limitation you mentioned is a lot like all of the table and column names in the SAP database. (Don’t ask me how I know this.)
Except, instead of six whole characters, all of the objects in SAP are four-character acronyms.
Four-character German acronyms.
There are roughly six billion tables (might be a slight exaggeration), each with about fifty columns. And no foreign keys.
It is a lot of fun to traverse those tables, hoping you got the join right.
Back in the olden days – 1984-ish, I had a FORTRAN 77 compiler for my commodore computer. I was never able to successfully compile any program with it. Other than the little 30 page manual that came with it, I had no reference materials – and in the days long before the internet – I was kinda stuck with it.
Fortran met my foreign language requirement in college. It sounds like by now it might be the Greek or Latin of computer languages?
Nope, there are current versions of it – the last release was in 2018. I was hoping that COBOL would die a grease fire death by now, but it seems to alive and well. FORTH, is probably the deadest of old languages – but even it has a GNU project.
There seems to a lot of old code out there still limping along.
I thought I was a hot shot FORTRAN programmer back in the day. In 1986 one interviewer for a big pharmaceutical company that needed someone to do Ingres database programming from FORTRAN (at which I already had some experience) at one point asked me where I’d rate myself as a FORTRAN programmer on a scale of 1-10. I told him 8 or 9, and then the conversation switched, as though he was offering me a job right then and there. He had to go through his HR of course, but they did offer about what I asked for. (That pharmaceutical company, which was a major employer in our area, has since been gobbled up by a bigger one which has been gobbled up by a bigger one.)
When I was going to school for physics a lot of the research equipment was in FORTRAN. Probably still is these fifteen years later.
I’m also told that a lot of the basic banking software is done in COBOL. I’d think long and hard before replacing banking software, because the penalty for screwing up is measured in $$$.
As one person remarked, it isn’t that the GOTO is so bad. It’s the COMEFROM that kills you.
Yup, both counts I think are correct.
I remember 20 years ago, I briefly worked as an auditor for holiday inn. Holiday Inn was an early innovator in computer systems, and back in the 1950s they where one of IBMs first non-government customers for their reservation system. It was one of the oldest systems in continuous operation. It was a data base that predated SQL by 40 years? I see that in 2017 Holiday Inn had a massive data breach on their new cloud based system. While it maybe a little more expensive to remain on old software – I think its safer.
In 1984 I got hold of a BASIC compile for my Commodore 64.
About half of my stash of games was stuffed typed in from Compute Magazine. We ran one of them through the compiler. It was kind of a lode-runner knockoff. Little guy running around on beams, climbing up and down ladders, etc.
Once we compiled it, it was impossible to play – it was so much faster than the native interpreted BASIC that every time you moved the joystick even the slightest bit to the left or right the guy would run off the edge of the beam and die.
Good times, good times.
Almost all banks run their core banking systems on VMS, still. But almost none of them own the mainframes anymore. Or the software for the core banking system. It’s all done by third parties, like IBM and Fujitsu. In fact, a lot of the VMS systems are starting to be run in VMs.
In the cloud.
So all the liability of modern cloud software, plus the impossible maintenance of COBOL on VMS.
Some stuff just won’t die.
On my current project, some of the guys are busy writing Python code to convert EBCDIC files to something modern software can actually read.
I loved typing in BASIC program from places like BYTE. Eventually one of them wrote a program that you would type the programs into, line by line, and it would hash the line of code, so you could compare it with the hash printed in the magazine for the line, so you could fix typing errors before running the program. Best innovation ever.
But compiled BASIC sounds similar to running old DOS programs on 486s in the mid-90s. Which is what the “turbo” button was for: to slow the clock speed on the CPU, so you didn’t get your butt kicked.
Speaking of my current project, they finally figured out something for me to do, so they (the client) can keep paying me. It’s extremely similar to something I’ve already done for them on another project, so it’ll probably take me a couple of hours. Good thing I have other stuff to work on these days.
I am not sure thats entirely true. Where I work, last summer was the year of the Z 14 – I think we installed 4 of them last year… This year has been about the Oracle M8 super cluster with 4 or 5 of them being installed this summer. as odd as it seems there are still companies that investing the millions to buy hardware.
Its kinda hard to miss these machines arrival – as they weigh in at nearly a ton (being quite literal about that) and require multiple 30Amp circuits to run. but on the plus side, if you stand behind them as they run – they’re like a full body hair dryer.
Instantly warm and toasty on a cold winter day.
Most of the Fujitsu OS/390 irons are sold to third parties. Banks pay millions of dollars a year not to have them on their books. None of the banks I’ve worked with in the last decade actually owned the hardware. I’m sure they’re still out there, but they’re becoming rarer.
The bank I was at had a mainframe or two in data centers I was in. I don’t know if they were also hiring services, but it’s not unheard of for them to have their own.
I dont see invoices or now this hardware is being financed … Maybe its being leased. I notice when a customer has some of this hardware in their cage.
I’m not saying banks don’t still own mainframes, just that it’s becoming much more rare.
I think market share of “mainframes” has rebounded. The PC/Server model of the corporate network certainly hammered them quite hard over the last 20 years, but Virtualization and application centralization has given them new life.
I should also have pointed out, that I am in Calgary – not a financial center – the customers I see with mainframe equipment in their cages are not banks.