Casey Jones requests:

I can't summon from almost 25 years of full-time work memories one specific day that was the worst.

The worst job I had? That's easy: my first full-time job, working in the home office of a chain of clothing boutiques in Minneapolis. I could not communicate with my boss; nobody knew what I was supposed to be doing or how to go about doing it effectively—least of all me—but it quickly became clear that it was not getting done. I lasted six months and then was transferred into something I could do.

Worst one-day commute? 13 hours from the pavement in the New York Financial District to my doorstep in Northern Virginia, in the middle of Hurricane Floyd in September, 2000. The cherry on the top of this turd sundae was a D.C. cab driver who probably hadn't been out of the district with a fare more than twice. I knew I was in trouble when I opened my eyes from a backseat doze to see that we were crossing the river on the 14th Street Bridge, not the Roosevelt.

The stupidest thing I ever did while gainfully employed was bitching out a member of the customer's accounting staff for mismanaging a software acceptance test (he'd failed to reset to known initial conditions in the database, so the results were unpredictable). I'd behaved so shamefully that another team member from a different consultancy told me, "If you ever do that again, find a different project to work on. You're embarrassing me."

My biggest waste of time was a three-day trip to Waltham, Mass. for training on a software product. The training modules didn't work, the instructor was ill-prepared, and the product didn't do the job we needed it to do. Fortunately, this was only a few years ago, and we had workstations at each desk, so my project manager and I spent half the time web-surfing.

I can't remember a worst one day, but I remember personality conflicts that drove me out the door. There was the mendacious hyper-controlling sales executive (Jenny was certain that he wore a corset). There was the young mathematician who apparently would only take task direction from a Ph.D., which I was not, of course. And then, oh yes, there was the job-secure systems programmer who sneered at a code-generation tool that I'd written of which I was rather proud. His idea of training me in the tools he'd written was to bring me into his office and watch him type while he debugged something. (And this was not, if you're familiar with the concept, some late-80's precursor of pair programming.)

The bad days were not the long days. When I was young, my job was the only validation I got, and my marriage was always rocky, so I enjoyed 50-hour weeks and the (very occasional!) all-nighter.

Why do I do this? Why do I write software? When it's good, you're in a zone some people call "flow." You don't notice that 30 or 45 minutes have dissolved away. It's like setting and solving a crossword puzzle at the same time, and you get to make up some new rules as you go along.

I also enjoy problem solving in small groups, but making that work smoothly is harder than reading a stack dump. I took some training in facilitation in my last job, and I wish I were using that skill more.

Sometimes it's just the money. Nowadays, my life outside of work is a lot more rewarding—theater, volunteering, chasing birds. All the things I blog about. Once, my mother told me that she'd read that William Faulkner would despair of his hack writing assignments in Hollywood. (I think she said Faulkner, though she can be vague about things like that, and anyway I haven't been able to verify the anecdote.) Anyway, she says that he used to tell himself, "They pay me Thursday."

posted: 4:37:26 PM