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clusterfucks: job
[Most of this post has been sat in a tab since July 12th because I meant to add more things and never did. Oh my shit it is actually August. :( ]
I'm having a hard time ordering my thoughts on this topic. I just deleted a gloomy paragraph or two from earlier this week, bitching about how hard it's been to keep my focus or feel much in the way of direction. Not that those problems are gone, just, I can feel them retreating into a manageable state. Anyway, facts: what I have been doing the last two weeks is research and datascrubbing for a dealsourcing database in a certain niche industry [henceforth referred to as 'bringing about the apocalypse' for absurdity value and occasional near-truth]. When I explained this to M he went "Ohh, you're a middleman!" YES. YES. I've never been a middleman before and I always wanted to try it because it appears to be where absolutely all the money in the world is. So, hello first ever finance industry job. It is, thus far, not very stimulating. That's partly a matter of learning to push on the neural buttons, but I figure it's mostly because no jobs are as stimulating as tax jobs, ever.
I am also not very good at it yet, obv. At first I just rode that usual groove of being accepting of my failsitude but also being a bit down about it, especially as I felt like I wasn't getting a lot of support. By Tuesday I was reflecting on how I would have been feeling about the setup if I wasn't getting paid. On Friday, I met the next-newest person and had that suddenly I don't seem so bad moment - don't know if he's being paid but he's got a high-level qualification in apocalypse-causing, no finance background and no common sense, and is high-maintenance as hell. So I guess I'll stay afloat with my ragbag of interdisiplinary knowhow - trufax, the bit of prior education that's been by far the most useful here was having read the whole of the The Compleat UberNerd's Guide To Mortgage Servicing for fun when I was stuck in FL last spring. (Florida is really fucking tedious, okay). <---no seriously if you want some useful practical knowhow about how debt instruments and derivatives work/how they fail, delivered in impeccable prose, get reading.
They do dress-down Fridays, which I had been instinctively revolting at because goddamnit I am an englishwoman and I like business casual. What I got was a chance to listen to a bunch of aggressively straight metrosexual guys who usually show up in pink and purple shirts all cooing over each other's hundred-dollar shoes. People seemed peoplelike all of a sudden, though I suspect this was mostly because management had wandered off to tend to unrelated personal drama. Maybe what I've been finding inaccessible isn't the atmosphere but the rhythm of it from one day to the next, the corners of the open space and time where it can percolate.
It was C's birthday, and he got out of work early - we don't work that close together, I'm in a downtown alley that always stinks of piss and cigarettes and he's in a shiny tower up in the financial district, but I am right next to one of his two equally viable trains home. I slipped out so we could get birthday coffee, and I found him on the corner with a bunch of yellow roses for his girlfriend. I told him how bad he is at birthdays.
"Web start-up companies are like play-companies. They stand in relation to real companies the way those cute little make-believe baking stations stand in relation to kitchens." <--Are Coders Worth It? by James Somers. I've had that feeling, although not exactly, because Zombies, Inc is not a web startup per se - we (dare I say 'we') are using borrowed tools to carve new information and sell it - and the mere lack of technical activity and the reliance on cheap-and-shitty cloud software, coupled with the grandiose titles, made part of my head want to say cargo cult startup? I may have been thinking too small by not seeing startups as a cargo cult phenomenon per se.
The other relevant thing I read lately was this piece on economic growth, the lack thereof, and 'information processing' jobs. This is actually my first information processing job, and I guess that was the cause of my lack of stimulation, my brain being roboticised and, ideally, interchangeable. It's the first job where I've been being paid to write anything, and I've been told I do well at keeping my text clean and to template; I am a good entry-writing robot. It's an open-plan place where most of us are in the same room. It took time for me to tune that out, to appreciate being able to know but not care what the sales team are doing this week. Money is made, by other people. What the lowly and supposedly interchangeable interns do is make the product, not hock it, but the same is true of any business.
I have been learning a lot, and I appreciate that. The gruesome details put most of a futuristic novel plot in my head (no zombies, lots of identity horror). I'm also building this web of how things in this world fit together, as one does; like, I run into new consequences of the Madoff scandal at least once a week. That dude got everywhere. The Enron collapse, too. Whistleblower lawsuits, fraud claims. Noisy success stories and silent failures. I get more interested in these details as time goes on, and therefore better at finding those neural buttons. This is about where I figured I'd be; glad I'm here, no intention of sticking around.
I'm having a hard time ordering my thoughts on this topic. I just deleted a gloomy paragraph or two from earlier this week, bitching about how hard it's been to keep my focus or feel much in the way of direction. Not that those problems are gone, just, I can feel them retreating into a manageable state. Anyway, facts: what I have been doing the last two weeks is research and datascrubbing for a dealsourcing database in a certain niche industry [henceforth referred to as 'bringing about the apocalypse' for absurdity value and occasional near-truth]. When I explained this to M he went "Ohh, you're a middleman!" YES. YES. I've never been a middleman before and I always wanted to try it because it appears to be where absolutely all the money in the world is. So, hello first ever finance industry job. It is, thus far, not very stimulating. That's partly a matter of learning to push on the neural buttons, but I figure it's mostly because no jobs are as stimulating as tax jobs, ever.
I am also not very good at it yet, obv. At first I just rode that usual groove of being accepting of my failsitude but also being a bit down about it, especially as I felt like I wasn't getting a lot of support. By Tuesday I was reflecting on how I would have been feeling about the setup if I wasn't getting paid. On Friday, I met the next-newest person and had that suddenly I don't seem so bad moment - don't know if he's being paid but he's got a high-level qualification in apocalypse-causing, no finance background and no common sense, and is high-maintenance as hell. So I guess I'll stay afloat with my ragbag of interdisiplinary knowhow - trufax, the bit of prior education that's been by far the most useful here was having read the whole of the The Compleat UberNerd's Guide To Mortgage Servicing for fun when I was stuck in FL last spring. (Florida is really fucking tedious, okay). <---no seriously if you want some useful practical knowhow about how debt instruments and derivatives work/how they fail, delivered in impeccable prose, get reading.
They do dress-down Fridays, which I had been instinctively revolting at because goddamnit I am an englishwoman and I like business casual. What I got was a chance to listen to a bunch of aggressively straight metrosexual guys who usually show up in pink and purple shirts all cooing over each other's hundred-dollar shoes. People seemed peoplelike all of a sudden, though I suspect this was mostly because management had wandered off to tend to unrelated personal drama. Maybe what I've been finding inaccessible isn't the atmosphere but the rhythm of it from one day to the next, the corners of the open space and time where it can percolate.
It was C's birthday, and he got out of work early - we don't work that close together, I'm in a downtown alley that always stinks of piss and cigarettes and he's in a shiny tower up in the financial district, but I am right next to one of his two equally viable trains home. I slipped out so we could get birthday coffee, and I found him on the corner with a bunch of yellow roses for his girlfriend. I told him how bad he is at birthdays.
"Web start-up companies are like play-companies. They stand in relation to real companies the way those cute little make-believe baking stations stand in relation to kitchens." <--Are Coders Worth It? by James Somers. I've had that feeling, although not exactly, because Zombies, Inc is not a web startup per se - we (dare I say 'we') are using borrowed tools to carve new information and sell it - and the mere lack of technical activity and the reliance on cheap-and-shitty cloud software, coupled with the grandiose titles, made part of my head want to say cargo cult startup? I may have been thinking too small by not seeing startups as a cargo cult phenomenon per se.
The other relevant thing I read lately was this piece on economic growth, the lack thereof, and 'information processing' jobs. This is actually my first information processing job, and I guess that was the cause of my lack of stimulation, my brain being roboticised and, ideally, interchangeable. It's the first job where I've been being paid to write anything, and I've been told I do well at keeping my text clean and to template; I am a good entry-writing robot. It's an open-plan place where most of us are in the same room. It took time for me to tune that out, to appreciate being able to know but not care what the sales team are doing this week. Money is made, by other people. What the lowly and supposedly interchangeable interns do is make the product, not hock it, but the same is true of any business.
I have been learning a lot, and I appreciate that. The gruesome details put most of a futuristic novel plot in my head (no zombies, lots of identity horror). I'm also building this web of how things in this world fit together, as one does; like, I run into new consequences of the Madoff scandal at least once a week. That dude got everywhere. The Enron collapse, too. Whistleblower lawsuits, fraud claims. Noisy success stories and silent failures. I get more interested in these details as time goes on, and therefore better at finding those neural buttons. This is about where I figured I'd be; glad I'm here, no intention of sticking around.
no subject
I read the James Somers piece. I may have to move to America as nobody around here throws money at web devs or estimates the value of the company by enumerating engineers. Notice that Somers is a middleman, too; I am, likewise, reformatting algorithms and code others have produced to create a copy-cat app of which many already exist. I tried to seduce my client into letting me write a piece of the "infrastructure", but if we really need it, he'll hire someone else to write it; I'm too "valuable" for that. (In truth the reason *I'm* a crap programmer is because I insist on writing my own infrastructure rather than using other peoples; when I act as a middleman I can be really good.) Somer's is not the only one to bankrole writing from programming; Greg Egan springs to mind.
The other piece on Robert Gordon helps me with an idea I've been kicking around for a while.
I spent Monday evening reading the SEP article on Feyerabend. I've jotted down something about scientists using Bayesian analysis in preference to naive falsification, but it doesn't make any sense.
Gee, have I written that much already.
no subject
My job is valuable in that, assuming the whole theory behind it is remotely valid, my work helps other people find money. Today the head of the sales team told us that he used to have a pitch where he described Zombies Inc as a dating agency where investors are girls and companies seeking financing are boys. Obv I perceive some flaws with this analogy, but I guess it's a step up from actual dating startups where no one gets anything except laid? (Which is a fine capitalist industry with a venerable heritage, I know, I know.)
fwiw I think it's mostly not the fault of the physicists, who tend to be quants; Brad Hicks talked about this distinction a bit here. (
Unfortunately his link to Michael Lewis's The End is now dead, iirc because the publisher imploded, but I remember it being very good.ETA: tracked it down on its new host. It's here.)no subject
Boundary conditions are drilled into you at A-level physics: Newtonian mechanics is nearly unfalsifiable in the sub-relativistic, macroscopic domain. But that notion of pushing an idea beyond it's boundary conditions is important one that happens again and again in the world. Big Pharma are doing it with SSRIs and viagra. The Robert Gordon piece is, similarly, an argument abound boundary conditions - does the existing approximation hold or have we shifted to a new regime that needs a new model?
But back to quants, look at how badly the finance industry treats them. My impression of the UK is that it treats all techs the same way the finance sector treats quants; the stars are the managers. (I've just looked through my inbox: I can get Somers 30k, although those jobs may require Microsoft skills he doesn't have; if he can do PHP, I can push it to 40K. There would be more opportunities and, presumably, higher wages in London. But they're nowhere near the level he's talking about. OTOH a sales job ended up in my inbox my mistake, and it's 40K base, and bonuses can take it to 80k + car + benefits...) My impression of America, outside Silicon Valley, is much the same; the chatter on the boards suggests that companies won't pay a decent wage and are using H1Bs to import cheap labour who turn out to be more qualified on paper than in practice. The valley is an aberration. Sometimes I would be like to be treated like a God (particularly when HMRC have issued a demand to pay the remainder of the money and are refusing to accept a payment plan). But I have freedom, I just want to waste it on pointless things... Although, once my client starts making money he will have to pay me more or I will look elsewhere. (He's just offered to hire an expert to help - you can pay me more first you git.)