So this past Monday I started my new job as a Senior Developer. So far it’s an absolute fantastic company, great location and really, really nice compensation. I feel that I’m now in a position that I actively want to be in and doing the kinds of things I want to be doing. It’s been rare over the last 10 or so months I had been back at Journey to get any sort of task that I felt personally involved in. When everything’s a mess, and you’re just trying to make it through the day, you stop caring. Everything is someone else’s mess that you’re made to clean up. That’s really what I felt every day, and it’s a real shame because there are a lot of very simple things that could have been done to avoid that.

I’m probably experiencing a lot of New Job Energy, which is the rush of optimism and intellectual curiosity that accompanies doing something new for 8+ hours a day. But more than that, I feel like I now have a personal stake in my work. Currently I’m the only in house developer (we plan on hiring more in the coming months as our plans take shape), and everything’s a blank slate. I got to set up SVN today according to my layout and restructured the code base we’re using on my terms.

I don’t dread getting up earlier to go to work. I don’t care about staying later to finish up work so I don’t have to remember it for the morning. I’m no longer looking at the clock several times a day. These are all good things. These are signs that I am truly involved in my position and I really care about the company. It’s a refreshing feeling. For a long time I felt that I should change careers, that I didn’t belong in software development if it was all what I had experienced so far. I had left Journey for 6 months for another company and felt absolutely trapped and constantly judged by very high standards. So much so that I went back to Journey because it was a way out and I honestly liked the people in IT. This didn’t help my anxiety about my career choice. I’m finally in a position where I feel that I am strong, that I am a good developer and I can build awesome things.

So enough of the gushing: what exactly is different?

• I no longer punch a clock: Seriously guys, salaried employees are salaried because they are trustworthy. You are paying them because their jobs involve thinking and a high level of expertise. Making them punch a clock is degrading and shows an obvious lack of understand of what they do.
• The company has a cohesive plan: We are definitely not a start up, but our department is. We are gearing up for some very cool things and the energy of a small start up is definitely there. Believe it or not, employees are highly tuned into the direction of the company. It’s depressing to feel that your company is doing poorly or doesn’t know what direction it’s going in.
• So far, I’m not personally annoyed by anyone: This is a biggie. In almost every job I’ve had, there’s always been one person at the company that is just so annoying or weird or obnoxious that it makes it a pain to be nice to that person. So far I haven’t met anyone that I wouldn’t have a beer with. Everyone is into their work and I’m into mine.
• I’m in charge: I’m laying the groundwork for development. I’m making the standards. This gives me a high sense of personal responsibility in the work I do.
• The job is a 20 minute commute: I’ve had an hour long commute for two years. Finally I have a job where I can sleep a little later and get home at a decent time. Of course the office is moving in a few weeks, but it’ll still be shorter.
• I feel generally appreciated for my work: It’s only been three days, but people are happy to see some of the work I’ve been doing. My coworkers don’t seem to have the chicken little syndrome that plagued my previous job. Things are not blamed on IT, but rather given to us to resolve. Being in a scapegoat department and having management that passively approves of it is the biggest demoralizer I’ve ever encountered.
• I’m being paid in yachts: Not really true, but I’m doing well enough that I no longer fear paying off my student loans or not having health insurance for my wife. I feel that my compensation is proportional to my experience and education for the first time.

So what made me leave my last job? Pretty much if you think about the reverse of the aforementioned list, you’d have my complaints. Honestly, though I will probably write what I feel in another post, I will say that it came down to a real lack of direction in the department and company as a whole, as well as a pervasive disregard for the work we did. The company had acquired another one back in January of this year, and its IT department absorbed ours.

With any merger there’s a clash of cultures, but we never really recovered. In our case it was a clash on several levels: Microsoft versus Open source, Dallas pragmatism versus Austin optimism, etc. While unfortunate, it did teach me a lot about leadership and what exactly people need on a social level in such a setting. People don’t want to be pigeonholed as X, sometimes they want to be Y but haven’t had the chance. Sometimes idealism and pure optimism aren’t enough to steer a ship clear of rocks. I have the highest respect for the members of my team that had come on board from Austin. They are a very, very smart group of people but very insular. I think it’s really to their detriment that such a bubble exists, but then again, it’s not their fault but rather upper management that reinforced it. All companies experience “the bubble” or “groupthink” to some extent, and it takes a very good team to break out of it. Keep it real, don’t let it form in the first place.

When I do get the chance to lead a team, I fully plan on taking the lessons I’ve learned from what didn’t work at Journey and applying them in a positive way. Letting people experiment and be creative or take full ownership of important projects are two of the best tools a leader can have to instill a sense of personal investment for members of their team.

Basically the argument boils down to two points:

1. It legitimizes an illegal military junta that has an oppressive hold on politics there.

2. It damages the environment because bottles are shipped from crazy-polluted China and then shipped to the U.S. in air polluting, diesel-powered ships.

These two things by themselves are indeed Very Bad Things. I don’t think you’d ever hear a rational person speak out in favor of undemocratic governments or damaging the environment to produce bottled water for celebrities. However as “world conscious” as we believe ourselves to be, I believe we miss the mark when we try to act like we actually give a shit about some third world nation half-way across the world because it’s trendy to do so.

I’m not going to hide it: I have a very deep disdain for the eco-conscious, socially-aware, neo-liberal hippie cult that has sprung up in popular culture over the last few years. I cringe a bit every time Angelina Jolie adopts another kid and a little part of me dies when I hear Bono discussing poverty in Africa he saw after flying there in his private jet. The problem is that while it’s commendable to want to do something for those who are less fortunate for us, we don’t truly understand the problem. How could we? We don’t live there. We are the equivalent of armchair quarterbacks yelling at the TV.

So, why exactly do I think it’s unfair to raise the alarm bells about how horrible one company is single-handedly making the world through their product? My number one issue is a simple matter of economics: Fiji water provides employment and a large boon to the local economy of a very impoverished nation.

“They don’t provide a living wage!” I can already hear you cry. Perhaps that’s so, but then again I don’t live in Fiji, I don’t know what a living wage there really entails. But I do understand that something is better than nothing. If Fiji water was shut down tomorrow, would Fiji be a better place with none of the money that they had previously brought in? Surely this isn’t a defense of Fiji water, but it’s something that is easily ignored by ultra-socially-aware zealots.

As for the matter of the military junta, is it really any of our business how the people of Fiji manage their affairs? I say this knowing it’s pretty controversial, but in some cultures true democracy does not work. In fact, our idea of a government ran by the people is pretty rare in existence. Most cultures accept the “government” and the “people” to be separate and distinct entities and do not see the actions of one to represent the other. This is a sombering thought that runs opposed to our deeply held beliefs of fairness, but the reality of life that we purposely ignore is that it is rarely fair nor does it always coincide with our beliefs.

I guess my major problem with articles such as these are that they ultimately serve no purpose. Will awareness do something about the injustices perpetrated by Fiji water? Will forwarding things like this to all of your friends do anything other than make you feel guilty for having the audacity of living in a first world nation? I’m not proud of what we sometimes do in America without throught about the world impact, but I don’t think I should feel guilty for living my life. If Itook a sip of Fiji water, does it make me directly responsible for the crackdown on dissent in Fiji? I’m sure some would say yes without batting an eye which is what truly bothers me.

We all have to play with the hand that we are dealt. I am a citizen of the world, but I am also a human being who has to live and take care of my own problems. Feeling guilty that I was born in America and have had opportunities that individuals in Bangladesh will never get does myself nor anyone else in the world any good. Neither does reading an article on how the bottled water we drink was distilled from the tears of a people a world away without actually doing anything about it, or truly understanding what their world is like. It would be insanely egotistical of me to assume what’s best for people of a culture I do not belong to, but that is what people are doing.

Actions speak much louder than words and empty gestures should be the ire of every human being.

Needless to say, my account is still open and I loved LJ for numerous years. I would try blogging with another service or even tried my own software but inevitably I would end up integrating with LJ to cross-post, getting frustrated and eventually going back. The reason why is that they were the first to truly introduce the concept of a social network to blogging and web sharing. Many have done it better, but LJ was the first. Everyone I communicated with online used the service, so it was necessary for me to keep my account and update there for all my “friends” to see it.

I haven’t really used LJ to blog since 2005, but I continue to keep my account open. I’ve often wondered in the past why the site still remains popular with certain groups of people, most notably slash fiction writers and furries. (I also hear that it’s the most popular blogging platform in Russia.) But what really perplexes me are the holdouts that still use it in defiance of everything that’s truly wrong with it: it hasn’t changed in ten years.

If you have a winning product, it’s not always necessary to change. However, LJ is so very outdated that the change required to stay current is enormous. At the time of its inception, there was no one doing the things it did with web sharing. Now there’s almost too many choices, and many make it much easier than LJ does and in more interesting ways.

LiveJournal has not even really valued its members and supports. I can’t even count the amount of drama raised over the years by the changing policies and heavy handed attempts at control by the numerous owners. But it was still simple and we continued to support it because of our friends list and communities. However even that’s coming to an end.

The service is irrelevant now days: everyone does it better somewhere else. Even the design of most LJ sites are horrible; things of MySpace esque nightmare. The cool emotion and music tags which were so cool in 1999 look horribly dated and childish now. And the user icons! So cliche and overused that LJ can actually sell extra space for them for a premium rate, regardless that sites such as Facebook allow an unlimited number of possible user icons.

I’m not even broaching the subject of integration. LiveJournal is so steadfast in their refusal to innovate or change that no one supports them anymore. So it’s even quickly becoming a thing of the past for me to use it as a secondary distribution for my writing. (Somehow, inexplicably, Posterous supports cross posting to LiveJournal so it may seem kind of ironic considering that this will end up there as well)

A friend of mine brought up an interesting observation the other day about his friends list. He noticed that his friends list had not updated in some time, and when it did it was aggregations from other sites. I’ve noticed this myself and while it makes me sad that eventually (soon) we’ll see the death of the service from attrition, I can’t help but feel a sense of relief. Sure, I have documented nearly 8 years of my life on LiveJournal including most of my turbulent early twenties, but as I’ve grown up I feel that either LJ needs to as well, or be lost forever as our generation logs off.

So, I plan on still updating Posterous for things that are in between a long post on this site and a tweet. If I want to share something quickly like a small set of pictures, that’s the place to do it: very fast, and very simple.

For my longer treatises on professional and even casual ramblings, I plan on updating this space.