maxopedia

For almost a year now, I have been working locally. However, last Friday I rolled off.

This means that I am due to be scheduled for a new project, apparently one in Minnesota.

At this point though, I am simply not willing to travel. Business travelers, my heart goes out to you. Modern airplane travel is a great abomination. Commercial jets are massive energy consumers and they don't even have the common decency to provide a plain-Jane passenger with a modicum of comfort; unlike our friendly buddies Air Conditioner and The Passenger Car.

Also, travel dislocates an individual. Some of the worst excesses of personality I have seen were acted out on the road. The type of person that enjoys this lifestyle for a long period of time is often not a nice person. Often, they tend to drink inordinate amounts of booze, combined with large amounts of heavy grub. More often than not this is at the client's expense.

In the past, I have let my managers know that I do not wish to be staffed on a traveling project. Unfortunately, there are few local projects.

When I heard yesterday that the next project that wanted me was not a local project, I let them know of my refusal to travel.

I'm not sure what reaction I expected, but not the one I received. My manager used a word that almost made me laugh, insubordination! That's such a ridiculously militaristic word.

Yeah, I understand that you think travel is in my job description, and me refusing to do so is 'against the rules' so to speak (interestingly, I never signed any documents of employment with HP that indicated travel is a requisite part of my job), but how is it INSUBORDINATION? I'm sorry buddy, but as far as I'm concerned, I am your equal, and hence insubordination is not possible. Just ask me to leave the company; isn't that the standard practice? Just tell me there are no local projects and ask for a resignation.

This is precisely the sort of thing I was discussing when this website was barely neonatal. (example 1, example 2)

I feel very insulted by this usage. Yeah, I'm some stupid punk kid on the bottom of the totem pole, but that's a little too much. It's almost as if my manager felt the need to shove my face against the hierarchical institution of HP, like I didn't get it or something. He seemed to really struggle with the idea that I could decide to not bend in the wind. I really don't get how being true to yourself can be considered 'insubordination'. We all have our own lines in the sand that we must draw, and their locations might very well change.

It's fine if you tell me that I no longer have a place at HP, but don't tell me that I'm 'insubordinate'. That implies you had the right to give me orders, rather than the ultimately temporary state of me granting you the privilege of doing so in the first place.

You know, after reading the Wikipedia entry on insubordination I think that maybe being insubordinate is a label that's going to work out for me.

It worked for Douglas MacArthur, Hunter S. Thompson, and Howard Zinn apparently. I'm in good company.

According to Pew Internet's Digital Footprints: Online Identity Management and Search in the Age of Transparency:

One in five workng American adults (20%) say their employer has a special policy about how employees handle themselves online - including what can be shared and posted on blogs and other websites.

This makes sense in the respect that you probably shouldn't blab company secrets in public forums. You don't talk about the upcoming earnings report or the new advertising initiative that's about to be unveiled unless those things happen to be part of your job description.

However, I could give a rat's ass if I violated any policies that attempt to govern my online activities. Hell, I don't even know if such policies exist at HP. Personally, I feel that if they don't like the way I present myself online, they can shove it.

I will probably go take a look and see if they do have any such policies. If I'm going to be violating them, I'd like to at least be aware of my transgressions. The report has this to say regarding peoples' awareness of the issue:

However, a modest segment of the working public - one in ten - admits that they don't know if their place of employment has policies or guidelines about how employees present themselves online.

I have never been good in dealing with those that assume they have authority. On the flip side of the coin, I am generally not good at ordering people around. It's not that I lack orders I could give, but rather that I don't feel I have that right over others.

Only the most serious of endeavors - organized warfare - truly requires a highly demarcated chain of command. Soldiers are not supposed to question orders for a good reason; they lack information. Not only do they lack information, they frequently lack the time to analyze that information and come to their own conclusions. Thus, I advance the notion that commands and orders are particularly nasty types of efficiency measures. They empower the giver and dehumanize the receiver while at the same time standing in place of true consensus.

As I've said before, the larger a corporation gets, the more it becomes like a total institution, with policies, procedures, and eminent managerial domain standing in place of consensual and reasoned analysis. These items may have been put into play based on healthful guiding principles, but by their very codification have become breeding grounds for petty power plays and other insidious inefficiencies. The letter of the law means far less than the spirit.

Businesses have the difficult goal of erecting a supportive and comprehensive framework for their constituents while still allowing them a great deal of autonomy. However, people don't generally do well inside of boxes, unless they are of their own construction.

It's my dream to be able to build an organization on the principles of true consensus. I'm not going to hold my breath.

For a while now, I've been going to work and hating every minute that I put more money in my employer's pocket than I put in my own. I spend much of time scheming ways that I can begin earning income on my own without working for anyone else than myself. If I form partnerships with people in the future, I want them to be mutually beneficial; one of my friends mentioned how we could 'work for each other.' That's exactly what I'm getting at; I want to work with people and not for someone.

Well, because I spend all day scheming on these things, I invariably end up discussing them with my co-workers, particularly those that I consider friends. Mostly this involves me talking about how although there is a lot of risk in starting your own business, it's almost a criminal act of stupidity not to, as long as you possess the requisite skills and a work ethic that will see you through to eventual success.

Well, one of my friends at work has taken my thoughts to heart. He now schemes far more openly than I do, and he openly expresses many of the dissatisfactions that I possess. His enthusiasm is inspiring, but I tend to keep a bit of a tighter lip about these things at work, although I will certainly discuss the most sensitive of information and ideas with him directly through secure channels.

Perhaps I am paranoid, but I don't really want everyone at work to know how I feel about the company and the project that I am on. I don't want any complications while I'm still working here. Corporate America is a very strange place, and that classic 'telephone game' effect is out in force. A tiny bit of dissatisfaction expressed to the wrong (right?) person can become a 'that guy is gonna leave tomorrow' when it finally comes through the grapevine to your boss. I don't want my boss to know anything about how I feel about the job unless it is absolutely necessary for me to communicate that information. If I am going to leave unless they give me a raise, I would like my boss to hear that from me first and not from some guy who might be out to 'get me' somehow. Just think about how hard it is to communicate unambiguously when you're directly talking to someone face-to-face. Even if only two face-to-face interactions are between you and your boss hearing about how you want to leave, that's huge potential for distortion.

I read this post a while back, and it stuck with me.

I had a moment today at work where I felt like I was in grade school again. I had a performance review. I don't have too much of a beef with performance reviews, because you need some sort of metric, but generally someone's review of you is not based on the actual work you do, but their perception of the work you do. This is why even if you really do nothing all day at work, as long as you keep telling your boss in detail about what you do -- up to a limit of course -- will make him think you're a superstar or something, as long as your peers think you're okay.

I've had performance reviews I thought were helpful. This was not one of them. I felt like I was about ten years old. It actually made me respect my reviewer less, although he is a guy that I do generally respect.

There's a famous sociology text that talks about the concept of a total institution, Asylums by Erving Goffman.

Very large corporations tend to share many of the same features as schools, prisons, and mental health facilities. Although this seems a little extreme, and I'm personally biased towards this viewpoint, I think that this is a very important concept that one needs to hold in their head. Basic psychological experiments involving placing people in positions of power generally bodes ill for their subjects. Placing people in charge of total institutions is particularly nasty.

I intend to do some research into this topic, and post my findings as relates to my corporate environment.

to be continued...

I'm sitting on the 31st floor of the Citicorp building in Chicago looking out over the Metra train tracks snaking out of Ogilvy station. The Boeing building seems so close I can just reach out and touch it. Unfortunately, I won't be in this c-suite office for long. It's pretty nice even though I share it with two other people.

I'm worried about my future - I don't want to work for anyone else in my entire life ever, unless I'm receiving as much value as I'm giving out. Currently, I don't feel I am in one of those situations.

It's simple math, really. I work as a data warehouse consultant for Hewlett-Packard. Depending on how my company negotiates billable consultant rates, I cost the client company $75-125 per hour. Meeting my billable hours goal consists of billing to a client approximately 80% of my time in a given year. Total hours available in a year = 40 * 52 = 2080, so I need to bill ~1600 hours per year, generating $120k of revenue. This is a very conservative number. More likely, I will bill 2000 hours for the year at an average bill rate of $100 = $200k in revenue generated. If I'm one of those schmucks that likes to kill themselves to make other people rich, I could easily be generating revenue for my company in excess of $200k.

I am paid $56k a year gross salary. After company match to 401k, medical benefits free money, and my bonus, my total compensation is approx. $63k a year. Even using very conservative numbers, I am giving them a 100% return on their payroll investment.

Granted, this does not include the compensation I receive in terms of life experience, although I believe I am now in a cycle of diminishing returns as far as that goes.

The only reason that the job I have now is worth it to me is that I am receiving much more value for my time than I would likely receive working for someone else. I graduated from college with a psychology degree, but I have an engineer's salary. However, this is faulty thinking, because selling my time is no way to get ahead, unless I'm selling it at exorbitant rates (anyone want to hire me for $100/hour to do ETL design/development?) that allow me to quickly build investment income. This is still not a very good situation - even if I could receive $100 an hour for my work, I'm not sure I would accept it. Perhaps a day or two here and there to get some guaranteed income, but always selling your time for fixed amounts of money is a bad idea.

Think about it this way; you could work for 10 years selling your time for $100 an hour. If you sold 2080 of your hours in a year, you'd make $208k for that year. Now imagine if you instead only directly sold half of your time in a given year, and invested the other half of your time into a business. In the first case, you've grossed an assured $2.08 million, while in the other you grossed $1.04 million over the same 10 year period, while investing $1.04 million worth of your time into your business.

If you could invest a million dollars into a sound, reliable business, don't you think you'd end up making more than if you simply sold your time for that $1.04 million? Obviously there's no guarantee here, but you're investing in a chance to kick that $100 rate to the ground. If your business starts bringing in twice as much money as selling your time, don't think it's time to raise your bill rate?