An Experiment in Scotch

Lit­tle story: I like foot­ball. A lot. One of the things I like about foot­ball is the chal­lenge of fig­ur­ing out, on a week-to-week basis, which team is going to win upcom­ing con­tests, specif­i­cally against the line, work­ing under the hypo­thet­i­cal that gam­bling on sports is legal in the US out­side Nevada. That’s another post entirely. I digress. Any­way, I use a very ratio­nal process involv­ing stats, more stats, some stats I made up, other stats other peo­ple made up and some con­sid­er­a­tion of the emo­tions of the par­tic­i­pat­ing teams. (That thud­ding sound you just heard was the 15 peo­ple who know my record so far this year read­ing the phrase “very ratio­nal process” and pass­ing out cold from dis­be­lief. Don’t worry, they’ll be fine).

Often times, I’ll do all that think­ing and con­vince myself that a par­tic­u­lar team is with­out a doubt going to win and all of this will hap­pen at a con­scious level. But some­where, deep in the tan­gled morass of my sub­con­scious, a lit­tle foot­ball fairy (no, not Jeff Gar­cia) will be telling me to for­get all that hard work because it’s not true. That stu­pid lit­tle fairy never tells me WHY it’s not true, just that it isn’t. Invari­ably, I’ll tell the lit­tle fairy to take a fly­ing leap and go with my ratio­nal the­ory. I almost always lose. Hunches and pre­mo­ni­tions and fairies seem to be pretty impor­tant when deal­ing with sys­tems that have so many vari­ables that they can’t all pos­si­bly be accounted for in statistics.

My frus­tra­tion comes in being a ratio­nal per­son (well, mostly. I’m highly irra­tional when it comes to fold­ing fit­ted sheets but again, I digress). I want to know WHY that pre­mo­ni­tion or hunch occurs. But usu­ally, that doesn’t happen.

What does any of this have to do with any­thing? Well, I’m cur­rently in the same posi­tion in my job search. There’s this job, it’s a good job by all accounts that I can fig­ure out and ratio­nally, I think it could be a pretty darn good job. But some­where, that stu­pid fairy is in the back of my head whis­per­ing some­thing I can’t quite make out and it’s dri­ving me insane. And this is far more impor­tant than some foot­ball game with $50 on the line. We’re talk­ing about 2–5 years of my life here and that’s not some­thing I can just deal with on a hunch.

So I’ve got to fig­ure this out, some­way, some­how. I think it may be a com­bi­na­tion of A) giv­ing up on sab­bat­i­cal, B) the lengthy com­mute involved with this job, and C) my per­sonal inse­cu­rity con­cern­ing being “The Expert”. That last part is impor­tant because at this job, there’d be two peo­ple in IT so the com­pany would in many ways be depen­dent on our deci­sions and actions. Point A isn’t really that big of a deal because I’m not much of a sab­bat­i­cal per­son in real­ity. I’ve done some cool stuff but I haven’t been nearly as pro­duc­tive as I should have been. Point B, well I think that if I like liv­ing in the coun­try, I’m going to either start my own com­pany or suck up and deal with a com­mute. I think that even­tu­ally, I’ll do the for­mer. I want to have fun at my job with peo­ple I per­son­ally like and do it within 25 miles of my home. Right now though, I don’t think it’s quite the time to make that leap. I need about 2–3 more years of solid devel­op­ment experience.

So I think it really comes down to C. And in real­ity, that’s prob­a­bly not that much dif­fer­ent from B, e.g. it’s time to suck it up and real­ize that I am an expert. That just feels dirty to type. I don’t guess I’ll ever see myself as “the expert”. Maybe “an expert”, but never “the expert”. I’m mostly just a guy who looks for the best way to get the job done and then tries to get as close to that as pos­si­ble. Maybe, in the end, that’s not a bad def­i­n­i­tion for expert in a field where lots of peo­ple seem to be con­tent with mediocrity.

So in the end, I think I may pur­sue this job. It’s not a given by any means that they offer it to me because there are still 3 or 4 more inter­view type things to go through but I’m past the hard part, e.g. con­vinc­ing them I’m worth every penny they might pay me which is never an easy task. Tak­ing a job should be a mostly ratio­nal process and if the pieces that you are look­ing for exist in a job, you should take it. If some­thing turns out later to be com­pletely oppo­site from those pieces that they didn’t tell you about, well then I think you’re jus­ti­fied in look­ing else­where. But in the begin­ning, you have to go with what you can ratio­nally fig­ure out and tell that damn fairy to take a fly­ing leap. Though it sure feels like I’m the one jump­ing off a cliff.