Post by curmudgeon on Feb 27, 2006 16:08:17 GMT -5
Referring to oneself in the third person, yes, that's always a good sign.
The lightning avatar you see at the time of this writing refers to my likeliest area of future employment - electrical engineering. For the moment, job prospects are poor in that area owing to in large part to the H1B program, but I suspect that in any area of study in which one can make one's own product, such discomfort is temporary at worst. Once the downsized find their way into venture capital, market discipline should kick in with a vengeance.
In the meanwhile, I'm making ends meet through Math, which oddly enough has been bringing me more income than my other major. (Physics was a bulky minor in undergrad, which didn't follow me into grad school, a fact that I sometimes regret). Tutoring, to be exact. Work has been slow to pick up, for almost everybody, really, but it's cash, and one sort of patches things together, a little money here, a little money there, until better times can be successfully found.
The name "Curmudgeon" is job related, or job-to-be related. Engineering is what one would call a very strongly reality-based profession, and part of the problem with such professions is that urban civilization allows a lot of the population the luxury of leaving reality behind. If you're a farmer, and you decide that your personal self-esteem demands an affirmation of your belief that copper sulfate makes a great fertilizer, all that you're going to end up with are some barren fields. Shout at the dirt and get all of the attitude you want, you're still not going to see anything growing, and the repo man will be there for your stuff the next season.
That tends to make for at least a little common sense, and in some ways it makes life a little easier and people easier to be around, because when the crazies need to get some sense slapped into them, nature's doing most of the slapping. By the time another human being even needs to say a word, a lot of the needed lesson has been driven home, and pleasantly enough, usually not in the harsh way the hypothetical example I gave would end.
As you're probably guessing from that last paragraph, I'm a hick by upbringing. That's not low self-esteem talking, I'm proud to claim the title, noting with some regret that the small town I grew up in has since been swallowed up by suburban sprawl. What's different about both corporate and urban life, I think, is that while the farmer or small rural businessman is reliant on his own efforts, in an area where people are naturally inclined to give local businesses a fair chance, leaving him with nobody to blame his mistakes on but himself, the person working in a more urban setting finds himself in a more collective situation.
Not that the rural population is a group of antisocial isolationists, by any means, but out there, figuring out who's responsible for what isn't too hard. Get downtown, though, where there's less individual and more team effort, and when something goes really, really wrong, the question of who is reponsible isn't always as obvious. And then there are the industrious few who will scramble madly to clean up other people's messes - but the catch is that those whose messes are cleaned up can then be lest with the illusion that all just naturally worked itself out, not taking note of or appreciating the efforts of somebody who may end up being told in the most condescending tone that he needs to "lighten up", usually by the people whose messes he just cleaned.
If you're in advertising, maybe one can sort of get away with giving in and acquiring a lassez-faire attitude, and maybe even have some fun doing so. Maybe. But engineering, like farming, deals with the physical world, and while people may be swept up enough in the spirit of the moment to want to go along to get along, physical reality won't ever be so obliging. It doesn't care about how strongly you feel about something, or how many people are ready to back you up, it will be what it will be and it will flatten you and yours if you don't respect it.
No amount of attitude will make a frozen o-ring seal properly, or bring back the people who get blown to bits when that seal fails. An insufficiently notorious example of a basic truth about a lot of tech jobs - if we embrace easy comfort and turn into the big, warm, huggy, malleable people some in the softer professions want us to be, really bad things happen and lots of people are maimed or killed horribly and unnecessarily. It's a sobering thought, if one has even a speck of conscience.
That characteristic seriousness has been mocked in popular literature, perhaps because it goes against the postmodern trend that started taking hold during the 1960s. In one play that comes to mind, the overly serious engineer (who comes to his senses and realizes that emotional liberation comes from not making sense, later), who works as a structural engineer, starts talking about how management is imposing its will on the design staff for an office tower that's going up, and how this is the kind of thing that lead to the Challenger disaster. A vaguely stoned sounding Clinton-aged character then speaks up, and dismissively asks "so you're working on the space shuttle", as if to prove how absurd the comparison is.
Yes, perhaps it would be, because what happened to the Challenger wouldn't even come close to the horror that would result if a 50 story building collapsed in the middle of a major city in the middle of a workday. Figure, 10,000 dead in the building itself, plus how many in adjacent structures when the debris hits them, and how many crushed in the streets below? 9-11 would pale by comparison.
Yes, it's just a play, but it portrays prevalent cultural attitudes with an unpraiseworthy accuracy. Probably one of the reasons why people in my profession-to-be don't tend to come from mainstream urban American cultural backgrounds - very often we find ourselves in an antagonistic relationship with a population that just won't let itself understand that we can't be good sports about it all, because we mustn't be.
Among all of those mean and not-at-all cuddly techies is the meanest and the least cuddliest at all, as some would see him - the one who stands up for the others, and when the hipsters and yuppies alike get in the faces of anybody who tries to discuss serious matters sensibly, gets right back in their faces with as much anger as they choose to make necessary. Some people think of that as being "mean", but they also seem to think that about the police whenever they arrest somebody. Somebody's got to do it, has to be the curmudgeon who won't just go along to get along or pretend to respect the actions of the people who do, and I think it speaks volumes about how much prolonged adolsecence is floating around that so many have trouble accepting that.
I am one of those curmudgeons, so I might as well call dibs on the title, and I did. Trolls and flames will be subject to being summarily ignored, deconstructed or lampooned, whatever my twisted little soul is in a mood for at the moment. Everything else will be responded to in the spirit it is offered, at the very least.
The lightning avatar you see at the time of this writing refers to my likeliest area of future employment - electrical engineering. For the moment, job prospects are poor in that area owing to in large part to the H1B program, but I suspect that in any area of study in which one can make one's own product, such discomfort is temporary at worst. Once the downsized find their way into venture capital, market discipline should kick in with a vengeance.
In the meanwhile, I'm making ends meet through Math, which oddly enough has been bringing me more income than my other major. (Physics was a bulky minor in undergrad, which didn't follow me into grad school, a fact that I sometimes regret). Tutoring, to be exact. Work has been slow to pick up, for almost everybody, really, but it's cash, and one sort of patches things together, a little money here, a little money there, until better times can be successfully found.
The name "Curmudgeon" is job related, or job-to-be related. Engineering is what one would call a very strongly reality-based profession, and part of the problem with such professions is that urban civilization allows a lot of the population the luxury of leaving reality behind. If you're a farmer, and you decide that your personal self-esteem demands an affirmation of your belief that copper sulfate makes a great fertilizer, all that you're going to end up with are some barren fields. Shout at the dirt and get all of the attitude you want, you're still not going to see anything growing, and the repo man will be there for your stuff the next season.
That tends to make for at least a little common sense, and in some ways it makes life a little easier and people easier to be around, because when the crazies need to get some sense slapped into them, nature's doing most of the slapping. By the time another human being even needs to say a word, a lot of the needed lesson has been driven home, and pleasantly enough, usually not in the harsh way the hypothetical example I gave would end.
As you're probably guessing from that last paragraph, I'm a hick by upbringing. That's not low self-esteem talking, I'm proud to claim the title, noting with some regret that the small town I grew up in has since been swallowed up by suburban sprawl. What's different about both corporate and urban life, I think, is that while the farmer or small rural businessman is reliant on his own efforts, in an area where people are naturally inclined to give local businesses a fair chance, leaving him with nobody to blame his mistakes on but himself, the person working in a more urban setting finds himself in a more collective situation.
Not that the rural population is a group of antisocial isolationists, by any means, but out there, figuring out who's responsible for what isn't too hard. Get downtown, though, where there's less individual and more team effort, and when something goes really, really wrong, the question of who is reponsible isn't always as obvious. And then there are the industrious few who will scramble madly to clean up other people's messes - but the catch is that those whose messes are cleaned up can then be lest with the illusion that all just naturally worked itself out, not taking note of or appreciating the efforts of somebody who may end up being told in the most condescending tone that he needs to "lighten up", usually by the people whose messes he just cleaned.
If you're in advertising, maybe one can sort of get away with giving in and acquiring a lassez-faire attitude, and maybe even have some fun doing so. Maybe. But engineering, like farming, deals with the physical world, and while people may be swept up enough in the spirit of the moment to want to go along to get along, physical reality won't ever be so obliging. It doesn't care about how strongly you feel about something, or how many people are ready to back you up, it will be what it will be and it will flatten you and yours if you don't respect it.
No amount of attitude will make a frozen o-ring seal properly, or bring back the people who get blown to bits when that seal fails. An insufficiently notorious example of a basic truth about a lot of tech jobs - if we embrace easy comfort and turn into the big, warm, huggy, malleable people some in the softer professions want us to be, really bad things happen and lots of people are maimed or killed horribly and unnecessarily. It's a sobering thought, if one has even a speck of conscience.
That characteristic seriousness has been mocked in popular literature, perhaps because it goes against the postmodern trend that started taking hold during the 1960s. In one play that comes to mind, the overly serious engineer (who comes to his senses and realizes that emotional liberation comes from not making sense, later), who works as a structural engineer, starts talking about how management is imposing its will on the design staff for an office tower that's going up, and how this is the kind of thing that lead to the Challenger disaster. A vaguely stoned sounding Clinton-aged character then speaks up, and dismissively asks "so you're working on the space shuttle", as if to prove how absurd the comparison is.
Yes, perhaps it would be, because what happened to the Challenger wouldn't even come close to the horror that would result if a 50 story building collapsed in the middle of a major city in the middle of a workday. Figure, 10,000 dead in the building itself, plus how many in adjacent structures when the debris hits them, and how many crushed in the streets below? 9-11 would pale by comparison.
Yes, it's just a play, but it portrays prevalent cultural attitudes with an unpraiseworthy accuracy. Probably one of the reasons why people in my profession-to-be don't tend to come from mainstream urban American cultural backgrounds - very often we find ourselves in an antagonistic relationship with a population that just won't let itself understand that we can't be good sports about it all, because we mustn't be.
Among all of those mean and not-at-all cuddly techies is the meanest and the least cuddliest at all, as some would see him - the one who stands up for the others, and when the hipsters and yuppies alike get in the faces of anybody who tries to discuss serious matters sensibly, gets right back in their faces with as much anger as they choose to make necessary. Some people think of that as being "mean", but they also seem to think that about the police whenever they arrest somebody. Somebody's got to do it, has to be the curmudgeon who won't just go along to get along or pretend to respect the actions of the people who do, and I think it speaks volumes about how much prolonged adolsecence is floating around that so many have trouble accepting that.
I am one of those curmudgeons, so I might as well call dibs on the title, and I did. Trolls and flames will be subject to being summarily ignored, deconstructed or lampooned, whatever my twisted little soul is in a mood for at the moment. Everything else will be responded to in the spirit it is offered, at the very least.
