I’ve belonged to a gym a couple times in the past. Every time I join one I discover that despite wanting to want to go to the gym, I rarely actually want to go to the gym. So I cancel my membership, ‘cause giving money to the gym (and not going) doesn’t make me feel any healthier, it just makes me feel silly, and a little bit poorer.
Recently I’ve started to think that way about work; I want to want to find a new thing, but I’m not convinced I actually want to.
It doesn’t help that I’m pretty unenthusiastic about the tech industry at the moment. My lack of enthusiasm isn’t entirely because of the impact of applied statistics (just imagine how much less crazy there’d be if we hadn’t called it “artificial intelligence”), but that’s certainly a contributor.
This isn’t “about” AI, but it’s a bit of an elephant in the room, so… if I set aside my revulsion that it’s all been built on blatant and willful theft [*], it’s beyond debate that these techniques can be remarkably – almost magically – effective. I have no doubt these systems [*] will continue to be valuable in situations where plausible answers are hard to generate, are (relatively) easy to test and verify, and where there are strong established mechanisms for testing new hypothesis and seeking disconfirming evidence. Sadly, this does not obviously describe most of the things these systems are being used for most of the time (at least by us “normal folks”).
I’ve come to see these systems – and the companies and “leaders” building and promoting them – as undoubetly societally transformative.
The way oxidization transforms metal.
Or mold transforms food.
Returning for a moment to the theft, and ongoing “bad behavior,” it seems clear that if a twenty-something immigrant had done even half of what these firms, and their products have done, that kid would be in jail – not raising shedloads of money and meeting with heads of state.
However, since we continue to demonstrate that that the pursuit of wealth trumps the rule of law, it would be stupid to hold my breath and wait for anyone to face criminal prosecution.
[deep breath]
…Where was I? Oh, yeah, work…
So, there’s a little voice in my head that’s starting to make noises about finding a new gig, but it hasn’t really said much about why. And why is my favorite question. So I sat quietly in a room for a while. [*]
The part of me that thinks a new gig is a good idea misses collaborating with people to solve problems that are bigger than me. Part of that is the solving problems, for sure, but quite a lot of it turns out to be “with people.” What some people get from church, or the Moose Lodge, or Boy Scouts, I’ve often gotten from work and colleagues. A sense of “us.” Of community.
I’ve worked alongside a bunch of amazing people, and many of those people I’d never have met if we hadn’t worked on solving the same problems for a while. There are people from jobs decades ago I’m fortunate to still count as close friends.
Working in a group – investing my time, attention and energy towards achieving common objectives – is, for me, social. “Demented and sad,” [*] perhaps, but social.
COVID snuffed out the idea of “work as a social club.” The sudden smash cut to working from home and collaborating over Slack and Zoom coincided with a precipitous drop in my job satisfaction.
My roles tend to be a mix of technical and organizational – sometimes doing a thing, sometimes helping people figure out what to (not) do and how (not) to do it. Doing that without face-to-face collaboration – and the serendipitous encounters it brings – made my role almost entirely transactional and candidly much harder. I struggled to stay motivated and connected.
Talking to friends and colleagues, it wasn’t just me.
I joke (in a “kidding-not-kidding” sort of way) that I get paid for two things – contributing value (which I generally enjoy) and tolerating bullshit (which I generally do not). How much there is in Column A vs. Column B matters – a lot. As we settled in to a COVID “new normal,” I felt like work was basically all Column B all the time.
That was clearly no good for me, no good for the team, and no good for my employer.
Something needed to change, but all the things I thought to change were far outside my control. So I stepped away, without a next thing, ’cause I couldn’t imagine what a good next thing might be, and stepping away for a while was a choice I was fortunate to be able to make.
When Axon reached out for a chat a few months later the timing was opportune. I was able to fly to Seattle for a “real interview” – the first face-to-face interview folks on my panel had done since COVID. The problem space and the prospect of helping build a team that worked “actually together” in London got me excited about work in a way I hadn’t been since COVID.
The next thing had found me.
A few years later and it was time for another change.
Like Amazon, I left Axon without a next thing. This time it wasn’t COVID that made a next thing hard to figure out, it was me. Specifically, my increasingly pessimistic – sometimes uncharacteristically cynical – view of the tech industry (and the AI bubble).
So, here we are.
I’ve spent my career working across an industry that I currently have a fairly bleak view of. I’ve loved working across tech because it was a powerful tool to solve problems. Too often these days, I feels like tech is the problem.
I’m sure there are problems out there worth solving, and teams that I’d enjoy working with to solve them. But despite wanting to want to start looking for them, I don’t yet want to.
And I’m not sure what to do about that.