As of July 14th, I will once again be returning to a life of corpo wageslavery but hopefully for the last time before retirement. In less than a week, I heard about this company through a friend and former co-worker that works there, interviewed, and had an offer. I accepted the offer on Monday and I’m starting now a week later.
I’m pretty excited about the job, and I think it’s going to work out really well for me. I’m going to be a Principal Software Engineer charged with focusing on helping the company start up two teams: analytics and AI. I’ll be doing some coding, some system architecture, some team leading, and some prototyping in a fully remote environment. I think it will be pretty much what I have been looking for, and there’s rumblings of a possible directorship in the future as the teams grow (but that’s not been promised nor is it guaranteed). I’m just mentioning it here because it is just one of the things that makes me think this is the right company for me at this right time, and could possibly be a company that I could retire from when the time comes.
Mixed Feelings
And of course, my stupid brain that has heretofore been bored out of its gourd after 2 years of no deadlines or strictures is starting to freak out a little bit. Sure, there’s the impostor syndrome which I constantly have to tamp down when going into an unfamiliar situation where I feel like I’m supposed to know everything (even when I’ve been explicitly told that this is not the case). But it’s also fully into the but I don’t want to be told what to do all the time if I don’t want to do it phase.
I’ve had 2 years to do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, and the number one thing that I’ve learned is that I am not independently motivated — I need to be asked or told what to do and if I don’t have some sort of deadline, I don’t really get anything done. I’ve lost a fair bit of my curiosity when it comes to “learning something just to learn it and know how it works” over the years; if I don’t end up immediately using it as a result of the learning, I just… don’t. (Incidentally, this is also why I’m terrible at exercising - the nebulous promise of “getting healthy” is too far away and ill-defined. That’s why I study karate, because it’s exercise that I know I can also practically use to defend myself if I have to.)
I’m railing against being on someone else’s time even knowing full well that when I’m on my own time, I don’t do anything. Like, there are sequences of days where I do nothing but eat, sleep, watch TV, and chat on fedi. Not that those things are bad, but they’re just meaningless once they start to stack up like that. And of course, now that I have been given a deadline to start on someone else’s time doing someone else’s things, my goofy grey matter is all like, “we’d better try to do all the things we have put off in the last 2 years right the hell NOW! because who knows when we’ll have time to do it again?!?”
What I Really Want, I Think
I think that this is where my self-centeredness comes in because I want to be asked to do something rather than being told to do it, because being asked means that I have the option to say no or not to participate. And I think that’s the crux of the issue: I want to do work because I believe in the team and the goals of the organization and yet not be forced to stay there or endure restrictive conditions solely because I depend on that specific job for basic living expenses.
The corpos have too much power to lock people into situations through fear, intimidation, and scarcity because we all depend on work in order to live. We work long hours and get taken advantage of because it’s too difficult to go find something else. I want to be beholden to the mission of the company and my teammates, not some nameless, faceless, greedy investors or shareholders that see me as just a cog in their money-printing machine.
Here’s what scares me about taking a new job: what happens when the “newness” wears off and maybe I see that those external forces have much more control and input than I was led to believe during the “courting” process? I’m looking for a company from which to retire. In essence, I hope that this will be the last time that I ever interview for a job. But sadly, there’s no guarantee that this will be the case because even if the company itself stays golden, there are so many external factors that could push it sideways (like our insane government, for one).
The long and short of it is that I need to feel invested in the work I’m doing, the team I’m doing it with, and I also need to feel valued and trusted to do the job they’re asking me to do. When one first starts out at a company, it feels like they’re the greatest thing since sliced bread because the company has decided that they need what you provide right now and I’m just hoping that it stays that way for a long time. I just want to be valued and respected as a person. That’s pretty much it.
Holy shit. It just hit me. I have to go to work on Monday. What have I done?
A Word About The Title
Yes, I know that the saying is “back to the old salt mine”. But years ago, there was an episode of a sitcom called Wings that I used to watch every day on the USA Network which featured the following exchange between Helen, the food counter owner at the airport, and Lowell, a simpleton airplane mechanic:
Lowell: “Well, back to the old salt lick!”
Helen: “Salt mine.”
Lowell: “Salt your what?”
Helen: “No, the saying is ‘salt mine’.”
Lowell: “Salt your what?”
Helen: sighs “Nevermind, Lowell.”
Lowell: grunts, gets up from the counter “Welp, back to the old salt lick!”
I’ve been saying it ever since.
