Walter shares his weekly thoughts, fears, and philosophies (or some bullshit like that).
All of this consumption of AI concepts and tooling, lately, is not inspiring anything productive in my life. I use it at work to script little transformations in order to validate data coming from external parties meets the requirements—what requirements?—for our internal Analytics team. Data pipelines should have been built already to do this for me; however, everyone is swamped at work between the myriad of requests, not only for clients, but also the administrative end-of-year bullshit that doesn't have a clear meaning to me yet.
A three-sixty (360) review process was just rolled out at work and I am not a fan of it. It's not that I cannot be a fan of it, it just takes more time than is given to complete it, and with little to no thought on how best to complete it, and no clear understanding of the reward is for completing it. Maybe provide the training 30 days before the roll-out, and give fifteen days to select folks for the 360 review; another fifteen for the review process itself. Instead, leadership has stuffed it all into three weeks, among regular work and holiday partying. No one wants to give reviews while they're partying on-site for the week. Taking time to reflect on co-worker's achievements is drowned out just by having to hang out with them in real time. And what's the point of these week-long Summit-parties? I basically just used the whole week to be constantly distracted from the work that I now have to catch up on just before the holiday break; time I'd like to spend with friends and family. So much for getting a holiday break—instead, leadership foisted upon me their insecurity of the company not feeling connected enough, and more anxiety about having to support new revenue targets for next year that appear to be 2x the multiple of the previous year.
I've been jaded by work lately. And I'm not alone. I speak with friends who describe similarly, and who also describe friends-of-friends with the same concerns. Am I just in a bubble of cynics? I don't think so. A lot of boondoggling has been going on the last fourteen years, with "easy money," and it appears to be bubbling to the surface now with interest rates now making it harder to borrow and build some fantasy start-up empire. And now the techies who are burnt out from the easy money are competing with the safer jobs, where I've probably been sitting my whole career. At least, this is the fear I have—that all the folks who abandoned SF are now moving to NYC, pushing up the rent and overselling themselves on the jobs that I typically would apply my old school corporate experience to. I'll tell you, I feel the squeeze in my rent, and at work. And as a result, the holiday season suffers as well.
Or does it? I hear that consumer spending is doing okay at a national level. Why is this important anymore? It's such a fucking stupid measure for health! But I'm no longer in the consumer crowd the way that I was brought up in my parent's household. In fact, I've been pushing back on the November-December consumer spend since before I had more financial freedom than I do now. But I can't seem to truly shake the spend. The more I make, the more I spend. And when I try to spend less, inflation creeps into my life on things like rent. I'd often ask myself as a child, after my mom would allude to how poor the family is (surprise, we're not as bad off as I was lead to believe), "well then why are we spending so much on toys and gadgets, effectively giving our money away to whoever? Why don't we just exchange money with our family?" Then, thoughts of exchanging money back and forth between family lead to a sense of pointlessness in giving at all!
The giving of anything tied to money has always sparked cognitive dissonance for me. This is not a novel revelation, so why is awareness of human's cognitive dissonance with materialism seemingly impossible to solve? Why is the act of "giving" so difficult to separate from monetary systems? Material gifts were always just distractions to make me feel better for some time. I'm not sure I ever felt a sense of "gift" from the items I received. I don't know what receiving a gift should feel like other than this latent frustration I'm describing; nor do I know how to give a gift to someone, especially my family, in a way that doesn't invoke this latent frustration! My partner is great at giving gifts; typically a well thought out card with a candle, or some other consumable item that she knows the receiver will use. She seems to enjoy this... But how are you to know if a gift is well-received? Why not give the gift of silence? Or leaving someone alone for once?
Suffice to say, I'd like the same at work. I'd like to not have to give performance feedback to coworkers. Isn't that the job of leadership? Aren't they supposed to be plugged into the work that their underlings are doing? Shouldn't that work have been done by leadership, so they know whether expectations are being met or exceeded? I'd rather enjoy the company of the humans I work with without the context of work. However, I just do not enjoy their company because of the intersection of the work that is unclear, insurmountable, and feels like a boondoggle. And it's because of the squeeze I feel in this economy that the work feels so unclear to me. I don't care if we're not in a recession—something about the state of work makes the economy feel recessed for me regardless of what Paul Krugman or any textbook economist would tell me. Our debt-to-GDP ratio is 120%! Higher than ever before, and I don't get a strong sense that America has the potential to create the momentum to become the exporter things again. And even if we were, what gift would America be giving to the rest of the world? More bombs? What gift would we want to give to ourselves? More cornmeal? I'd like affordable housing, I know that. I'd like to know that society is not crumbling, or that our ecosystem will not be decimated to a point where it cannot support my future offspring.
All of this consumption of AI concepts and tooling, lately, is not inspiring anything productive in my life. I use it at work to script little transformations in order to validate data coming from external parties meets the requirements—what requirements?—for our internal Analytics team. Data pipelines should have been built already to do this for me; however, everyone is swamped at work between the myriad of requests, not only for clients, but also the administrative end-of-year bullshit that doesn't have a clear meaning to me yet.
A three-sixty (360) review process was just rolled out at work and I am not a fan of it. It's not that I cannot be a fan of it, it just takes more time than is given to complete it, and with little to no thought on how best to complete it, and no clear understanding of the reward is for completing it. Maybe provide the training 30 days before the roll-out, and give fifteen days to select folks for the 360 review; another fifteen for the review process itself. Instead, leadership has stuffed it all into three weeks, among regular work and holiday partying. No one wants to give reviews while they're partying on-site for the week. Taking time to reflect on co-worker's achievements is drowned out just by having to hang out with them in real time. And what's the point of these week-long Summit-parties? I basically just used the whole week to be constantly distracted from the work that I now have to catch up on just before the holiday break; time I'd like to spend with friends and family. So much for getting a holiday break—instead, leadership foisted upon me their insecurity of the company not feeling connected enough, and more anxiety about having to support new revenue targets for next year that appear to be 2x the multiple of the previous year.
I've been jaded by work lately. And I'm not alone. I speak with friends who describe similarly, and who also describe friends-of-friends with the same concerns. Am I just in a bubble of cynics? I don't think so. A lot of boondoggling has been going on the last fourteen years, with "easy money," and it appears to be bubbling to the surface now with interest rates now making it harder to borrow and build some fantasy start-up empire. And now the techies who are burnt out from the easy money are competing with the safer jobs, where I've probably been sitting my whole career. At least, this is the fear I have—that all the folks who abandoned SF are now moving to NYC, pushing up the rent and overselling themselves on the jobs that I typically would apply my old school corporate experience to. I'll tell you, I feel the squeeze in my rent, and at work. And as a result, the holiday season suffers as well.
Or does it? I hear that consumer spending is doing okay at a national level. Why is this important anymore? It's such a fucking stupid measure for health! But I'm no longer in the consumer crowd the way that I was brought up in my parent's household. In fact, I've been pushing back on the November-December consumer spend since before I had more financial freedom than I do now. But I can't seem to truly shake the spend. The more I make, the more I spend. And when I try to spend less, inflation creeps into my life on things like rent. I'd often ask myself as a child, after my mom would allude to how poor the family is (surprise, we're not as bad off as I was lead to believe), "well then why are we spending so much on toys and gadgets, effectively giving our money away to whoever? Why don't we just exchange money with our family?" Then, thoughts of exchanging money back and forth between family lead to a sense of pointlessness in giving at all!
The giving of anything tied to money has always sparked cognitive dissonance for me. This is not a novel revelation, so why is awareness of human's cognitive dissonance with materialism seemingly impossible to solve? Why is the act of "giving" so difficult to separate from monetary systems? Material gifts were always just distractions to make me feel better for some time. I'm not sure I ever felt a sense of "gift" from the items I received. I don't know what receiving a gift should feel like other than this latent frustration I'm describing; nor do I know how to give a gift to someone, especially my family, in a way that doesn't invoke this latent frustration! My partner is great at giving gifts; typically a well thought out card with a candle, or some other consumable item that she knows the receiver will use. She seems to enjoy this... But how are you to know if a gift is well-received? Why not give the gift of silence? Or leaving someone alone for once?
Suffice to say, I'd like the same at work. I'd like to not have to give performance feedback to coworkers. Isn't that the job of leadership? Aren't they supposed to be plugged into the work that their underlings are doing? Shouldn't that work have been done by leadership, so they know whether expectations are being met or exceeded? I'd rather enjoy the company of the humans I work with without the context of work. However, I just do not enjoy their company because of the intersection of the work that is unclear, insurmountable, and feels like a boondoggle. And it's because of the squeeze I feel in this economy that the work feels so unclear to me. I don't care if we're not in a recession—something about the state of work makes the economy feel recessed for me regardless of what Paul Krugman or any textbook economist would tell me. Our debt-to-GDP ratio is 120%! Higher than ever before, and I don't get a strong sense that America has the potential to create the momentum to become the exporter things again. And even if we were, what gift would America be giving to the rest of the world? More bombs? What gift would we want to give to ourselves? More cornmeal? I'd like affordable housing, I know that. I'd like to know that society is not crumbling, or that our ecosystem will not be decimated to a point where it cannot support my future offspring.
2 comments:
Is "boondoggled" a Walter word or an AI word?
I've been thinking a lot about what you have to say about consumerism here, Walter. I think I agree with it, but I also think that there is another answer. Yeah, man, fucking sucks that it feels sometimes like we are just spending money for the sake of it. I've felt that way a lot this year! But I also personally refuse to let that fact consume this whole season, Christmastime, during which I still see that "magic" we felt as kids, shit that has nothing to do with buying toys. There's a way to make someone feel special vis-à-vis gift-giving that doesn't have anything to do with money or consumption or technology or capitalism. The challenge, I guess, is to find that way.
P.S. currently training my ChatGPT to use "boondoggled" as often as possible.
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