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Whichever Way It Goes I stopped and had a drink with two friends who had left the company some time back and were now working across the Bay. We have small clusters of old friends and ex-office mates who work for various companies in the Bay Area: Schwab and Oracle are big ones, but Visa, Levis and others as well. This evening I had a couple of beers with Schwab and Visa. My friend at Schwab is in transition, having moved temporarily to Oakland from San Francisco and Mr. Visa lives up in the Oakland hills, telecommuting two days a week from home and studying the game of baseball. A little voice said ohhhhh.... Telecommuting. I wonder... how that... really... works.... It's curious how mobile everyone seems to be. Schwab is growing like crazy so they're going through reorganizations all the time trying to keep up. This makes for unsettling times and there's a lot of shuffle, but at least no one's losing their employment and the stock is going up so rapidly that half of them are actually getting rich, something I have no experience with. I suspect when these guys retire they're going to live a very different kind of life than I am, but what the hell, when am I ever going to retire? Fired yes, retired no. Still, the vagaries of life aside, it's nice to sit and have a few beers and talk about art and life and matters digital. There is a job that has become available in the company that I am applying for. I mentioned it way back somewhere in this journal, but it has finally been posted, a web related job that would be perfect for what I'm looking to do. There will be a lot of people within the company who will apply for it and some of them are very good, but that's not a particular worry. I've been feeling more and more comfortable about web production, the actual coding of the pages, the structure and organization of sites and the job I now have allows me lots of time to pursue these. Whether I get the job or not, I will be pushing the envelope pretty hard and learning all I want about web sites, interfacing them with the mainframes and the Unix boxes and putting together a skill set that will have some use (if necessary) in the wider world. That makes me feel better about the future, because testing new technologies: software, hardware, whatever. Being a CNE and an MCSE or whatever the next set of letters might be is getting old. I still like the toys and the tools, but I've cracked one too many computer boxes and tweaked one too many servers. Time for something different and the web seems to fit that bill. At least the internal motor seems to be turning over and I'm starting to feel the thing suck me in, smiling. Wish me luck, but I think I've got the luck whichever way it goes. |
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