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Sep. 19th, 2006 11:38 pmI am a little worried about my career. I have stepped out of my comfort zone.
I say I was trained as a UI Designer, but actually, my 4-year thesis-capped degree at the Vrije Universiteit was formally in "Software Engineering, Human Interaction Variant". Which means that, besides some classes in Human-Machine Interaction, I also got a good theoretical education in the process of creating large programs, and the internship for the thesis happened to be doing a major reorganization of a C windowing library. (where I learned that C was so primitive you have to allocate memory for strings. Yes, when I cut my teeth, I cut them good. The pretty colors of the buffer overflows in X windows were a colorful joy to behold.)
Before I joined Disney, my work has always been hardcore software creation. Yes, I did actually get to specialize in creating UIs, but it was always 20% design, 80% having to actually implement them. I know about programming environments, debuggers, core-dumps, watch points, refactoring, code-inspections. I have used uber-leet code visualizers from SGIs original Workbench to Eclipse down to stepping line by line in gdb down to having only printfs. (Especially when coding for mobile devices it seems that the more cutting edge the phone, the more primitive the tools for debugging.)
What I am saying is, I had chops. Good chops.Big or smal systems, I could handle it. From Children's Hospital on, I had a rep for not bloody stopping until it damn well worked. (I also had a rep for being sloppy and always needing a good QA team to slap my hand. Hi Mike! Hi Amy!) And that is job security. I could have gone on for the next three decades just doing mercenary contract work. Stable and always in demand, with an ever growing list of tech and problems solved.
And hating it. Being a Software Engineer is intellectually satisfying, but as the years went on, to me it was only satisfying in the same way solving the NYT Crossword is: you do it, you feel all great, and next week there's another one. I kept solving the same problems, and every year thinking, ya know, this isn't really what I want to do. I actually went into this side of computing because I liked the pretty colors and shapes and and lovely typography. I went into UIs because this was the closest to visual beauty a guy with no graphic talent could get. I am dissapointed I never broke into the Information Visualization field, but if I had, most of my time would have been coding tools instead of getting to use them and find interesting patterns in data. I always liked using tools more than creating them. I like assembling experiences from beautiful pieces, not having to handcrank them together. This difference may not make sense to many coders, but this is the best I can articulate it.
So yes, even as a Research Engineer, I was always spending more time creating the software for the back-end more than I got to create environments. The best time I had at Nokia was when it was just me and a very stable and well thought-out tool to create websites with, with which I tried to make these totally automated open friendly systems where users could put their stuff up with the least possible effort. I was managing hosters in Helsinki, talking to my manager in Boston about policies and procedures, and assembling it all together with tiny amounts of scripting and many pieces lay-out and colors and specifying flows. I had such fun in that gig. Nokia has been nothing but good to me, but the circumstances, both location and growth, were not in place for me to both continue with that project and be happy.
And then I got recruited for this Disney Mobile future services gig. And now there's no Software Engineering. None. The job morphed into a total idea-generation job. I did do one demo in FlashLite, but that was, in all, 20 lines of code. I am not an architect. I am not a coder. I am not a Software Engineer anymore. I have left that security. I am now an idea guy, an opinions guy, a presentations guy. I work with Imagineers and Illustrators and Animators and Graphic Designers to step through scenarios and visualize our thoughts, I sit in on meetings of Product and BizDev division to know what is happening on the ground as I and other groups help develop the future.
I am kind of scared, I fear that one year of this and I will have no cred in the field that would always be there to pay the bills. Software ENgineering changes so fast if you want to stay in the interesting bits. Yes, I am over-scared, it will not be that bad should I choose to return, but what if I don't want to? Where do guys like me go? I am off the beaten path and on a road I have no idea how to travel. And, although I wanted to leave the hardcore coding, and worked to do so, it actually happened before I knew it.
Oh wow. I'd better make this work.
I say I was trained as a UI Designer, but actually, my 4-year thesis-capped degree at the Vrije Universiteit was formally in "Software Engineering, Human Interaction Variant". Which means that, besides some classes in Human-Machine Interaction, I also got a good theoretical education in the process of creating large programs, and the internship for the thesis happened to be doing a major reorganization of a C windowing library. (where I learned that C was so primitive you have to allocate memory for strings. Yes, when I cut my teeth, I cut them good. The pretty colors of the buffer overflows in X windows were a colorful joy to behold.)
Before I joined Disney, my work has always been hardcore software creation. Yes, I did actually get to specialize in creating UIs, but it was always 20% design, 80% having to actually implement them. I know about programming environments, debuggers, core-dumps, watch points, refactoring, code-inspections. I have used uber-leet code visualizers from SGIs original Workbench to Eclipse down to stepping line by line in gdb down to having only printfs. (Especially when coding for mobile devices it seems that the more cutting edge the phone, the more primitive the tools for debugging.)
What I am saying is, I had chops. Good chops.Big or smal systems, I could handle it. From Children's Hospital on, I had a rep for not bloody stopping until it damn well worked. (I also had a rep for being sloppy and always needing a good QA team to slap my hand. Hi Mike! Hi Amy!) And that is job security. I could have gone on for the next three decades just doing mercenary contract work. Stable and always in demand, with an ever growing list of tech and problems solved.
And hating it. Being a Software Engineer is intellectually satisfying, but as the years went on, to me it was only satisfying in the same way solving the NYT Crossword is: you do it, you feel all great, and next week there's another one. I kept solving the same problems, and every year thinking, ya know, this isn't really what I want to do. I actually went into this side of computing because I liked the pretty colors and shapes and and lovely typography. I went into UIs because this was the closest to visual beauty a guy with no graphic talent could get. I am dissapointed I never broke into the Information Visualization field, but if I had, most of my time would have been coding tools instead of getting to use them and find interesting patterns in data. I always liked using tools more than creating them. I like assembling experiences from beautiful pieces, not having to handcrank them together. This difference may not make sense to many coders, but this is the best I can articulate it.
So yes, even as a Research Engineer, I was always spending more time creating the software for the back-end more than I got to create environments. The best time I had at Nokia was when it was just me and a very stable and well thought-out tool to create websites with, with which I tried to make these totally automated open friendly systems where users could put their stuff up with the least possible effort. I was managing hosters in Helsinki, talking to my manager in Boston about policies and procedures, and assembling it all together with tiny amounts of scripting and many pieces lay-out and colors and specifying flows. I had such fun in that gig. Nokia has been nothing but good to me, but the circumstances, both location and growth, were not in place for me to both continue with that project and be happy.
And then I got recruited for this Disney Mobile future services gig. And now there's no Software Engineering. None. The job morphed into a total idea-generation job. I did do one demo in FlashLite, but that was, in all, 20 lines of code. I am not an architect. I am not a coder. I am not a Software Engineer anymore. I have left that security. I am now an idea guy, an opinions guy, a presentations guy. I work with Imagineers and Illustrators and Animators and Graphic Designers to step through scenarios and visualize our thoughts, I sit in on meetings of Product and BizDev division to know what is happening on the ground as I and other groups help develop the future.
I am kind of scared, I fear that one year of this and I will have no cred in the field that would always be there to pay the bills. Software ENgineering changes so fast if you want to stay in the interesting bits. Yes, I am over-scared, it will not be that bad should I choose to return, but what if I don't want to? Where do guys like me go? I am off the beaten path and on a road I have no idea how to travel. And, although I wanted to leave the hardcore coding, and worked to do so, it actually happened before I knew it.
Oh wow. I'd better make this work.
