Lisa Call

As most of you know I work as a software engineer for a huge international software giant. For the most part I enjoy my job, enjoy the challenges of new projects and really like the people I work with.

Yesterday we had an "all hands" with a middle level exec. I’m not sure the purpose of these meetings, as they tend to be painful boring, but to entice us to show up they give out awards, $100 and a paper weight for working hard to a small group of people. It’s not that dissimilar to my experiences in grade school when picking sides for some sporting game. Almost everyone I work with works extremely hard and it just seems somehow cruel to point out only a handful. But given that the project I worked on for 2 1/2 years was very successful and recently released it was generally assumed we would likely be getting awards.

When the development award came up only 4 senior team members were credited. It was rather demoralizing. Okay not rather, it was demoralizing. Exactly like that team picking experience. Fortunately (or more likely unfortunately) I was in good company because the woman next to me had to sit and watch as the testing engineer and product manager received awards for the project she led but her contributions were never mentioned.

Sigh. It’s a rare day I agree that working for a nameless faceless corporation is necessarily all that evil, but yesterday was one such day. It is a soul destroying exercise to continue to do your best with out recognition. I often wonder if anyone other than my manager values my work or even understands what I do. I sort of created my own position here as a requirements engineer, a rather rare position in a software company.

I emailed my manager about the award and he reiterated he valued my work. He’s a good guy and didn’t know this was going to happen until a short time before and he tried to change it to include the whole team.

Good intentions, but given the lack of communication (before or after) about event and his feelings and that the director that selected the subset of the team members didn’t think enough of my contribution to include me is just more fodder pointing to the futility of putting a huge amount of effort into a job where the returns are very limited.

It’s no secret I’d rather be in my studio fulltime, working for myself, and having only myself to blame when my career doesn’t go the direction I’d like it to. It’s also no secret I’m a single mom in need of an income. Sure I don’t need to live on a software engineers salary but I still need cash to survive. I know there are very few jobs out there that pay as well as my current job, so I stay, doing my best every day to put a positive spin on things and just move on. Switching jobs won’t change that I’d still be working for someone else and if I’m going to take time away from my art career I want to maximize the returns for that time.

I do really enjoy the people I work with. I often find software engineers more interesting than many artists, I think we are a hidden group of really interesting people. Some are serious pains to work with but they are just down right fun as people, and the challenge of learning to work with so many different personalities in an authentic way is an excellent skill to acquire.
 

I think about the future, knowing that I can’t live the rest of my life working for someone else so I spend significantly less than I make, squirreling away a chunk of money every month for the day when my kids leave home and I can move onto the next phase of my life, the fulltime artist. My sense of responsibility towards my kids doesn’t allow me to just chuck it all now. Just doesn’t fit my personality and I need to be true to myself.

I’ve investigated the idea of passive income, doing something that requires very little effort but results in a nice payout of cash. There are numerous of blogs out there talking about how to do this. Most of these people are making money from their blog, advertising, etc. My favorite is Genius Types, written by a guy that aspires to be a movie director and producer once he has the income to whatever he’d like.

Much of his income comes from his blog, which has some interesting articles. So I think about turning my blog into a commercial affair and making cash from the folks that come to read what I write. My traffic (based on pageview) matches that of genius types so in theory I could do this. I look at empty easel and see an example of an artist doing just that. The articles on empty easel are also interesting and I certainly have the technical background to give blogging/website advice to artists.

There are 2 things that stop me from doing this. The amount of time to create such a blog would be at least 10 to 15 hours a week. It would be about the end of me having free time to spend in my studio. Eventually it would pay off and I could replace a portion of the day job with passive blogging but at this point I’m not interested in paying the 3-6 months start up pain in terms of time. I have no doubt this is a short sighted view and one mostly based on fear. But at least I know that. I like blogging and I like helping people so this activity is a good fit for me.

Problem is I really don’t like ads on the internet. I run firefox with the adblock plugin turned on. I rarely will see an internet ad. So this just feels very wrong to me. I feel that many internet ads are misleading and that in participating in this type of thing I would contributing to people being ripped off. That doesn’t sit well with me.

Maybe someday I’d do a blog like empty easel but it would be ad free, I’d do it to help others, not to make money off of them. So that project will have to wait until I have more free time in my life.

 
Reading these types of blogs led me to the book The 4 hour work week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich . Again based on the same concept of passive income, although he’s pushing internet businesses. The guy that wrote the book makes his money selling "supplements" over the internet.

One of the first examples he mentions to demonstrate premise is a story about him winning a kick boxing championship. He does this by finding the loop holes in the rules and exploiting them. He dehydrates and weighs in much lighter than his real weight, then rehydrates, gains back 15 pounds in a day. He knows if he just knocks his much smaller and lighter opponents out of the ring 3 times he wins. Not because he can kickbox, but because he has outsmarted them.

I found this story morally reprehensible and felt yucky reading (well actually listening to) the rest of the book. I think about the competitors that trained for this match and honed their skills, only to face a bully that didn’t care about honor, he just wanted a championship to boast about. He even admits the judges were annoyed at him but he doesn’t seem to show any acknowledgment there was a good reason for that annoyance. He is instead extremely proud of himself.

Maybe this type of behavior is authentic for the author but it just doesn’t work for me. Much of the book displays a similar lack of compassion for anyone but himself. While I’m sure there were some interesting ideas in this book I didn’t get much from it because I was so disgusted. He claims it’s not a time management book but much of what he had to say I’ve heard else where in other time management books, such as Eat That Frog.

 
What all this boils down to, no matter how demoralizing working at this mega corporation can be on certain days, it is still the most authentic choice for me right now. So I’ve moved beyond the disappointing day yesterday and stayed up until 1am to finish some work that must be done. (interestingly at 1am the other woman that didn’t get an award was also online working - there’s something to think about). I suspect I’ll have 3 or 4 more nights like this over the next week to meet some deadlines but maybe if my manager is generous he’ll give me some additional time off work around christmas to compensate given our lack of sufficient vacation time.