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August 03, 2005
if its not one its the other
if sometimes it seems like the only things I do are complain about work and take care of naomi, that's only becaues sometimes it seems that way to me.
and i have no problem with naomi at all.
as for work, I can only complain so much. partially because i've read enough about people being fired for job blogging (this article runs through some of the more famous incidents) and also because it gets tiring to do so (I can only imagine how tiring it is to read about it repeatedly).
I can actually trace all of this back to the simple fact that I don't know if I am doing what I *should* be doing with my life. Let me rewind further and explain that this whole career of mine, software quality assurance (or QA testing to those of you in the industry) was something that I more or less lucked into. I was one of many typical Asian kids waltzing into UC Berkeley with some faint notion of being pre-med (I wanted to be a pediatrician, once upon a time). While I managed to hang onto this pipe dream for over 3 years, I was finally disabused of the notion of continuing on by Chem 130, otherwise known as Inorganic Chemistry. What started out as an attempt at a double major in Mass Communications ended up becoming my sole degree from Cal (I am tempted from time to time to see how hard it would be to finish up the rest of my classes in MCB -- I think I have 4 left).
So its junior year and while my friends are all dressing up and heading off to the fairs to speak to Andersen Consulting (Accenture these days) and other firms (I *think* it was the Big Five back then), I sat around not really thinking about what I was going to do after college. Even though I finished up my Mass Comm degree, I never really seriously considered journalism as a career. I get an e-mail forward from Christine Chan mentioning this 6 week summer job at a place called The Learning Company (now Broderbund <= how old am I when every company I mention no longer exists currently!). It was something about testing this children's software game for 6 weeks, with an opportunity for overtime pay. I figure I could use the extra cash, and the company was located 15 minutes away from my parents' place, so off I went.
It was crazy, it was exhausting, but it was some of the most exciting time that I can ever remember spending. I worked 12 hour days, and even some weekends to help get this product out the door. It was the first time I had ever worked in a "real" job (prior to that, I was a TA and I worked at the computer labs on campus) and I think that was part of what made it exciting. Also, at the time, it hit me that this was something that I could be really good at. This was at a time when I felt like college (and all those pre-med) classes had seriously kicked my ass. In contrast, the people at this company were all very complimentary of my work. My self-esteem thanks them.
And I've been doing QA more or less ever since. I did take a year off or so after that first post-college job doing QA because I wasn't sure if I was doing the right thing in my life, but I ended up going back to QA because doing anything else would have meant starting over and making less money. Of course, doing this right through the peak of the dot-com era made it nice as well.
But now that I look at it, QA, at its most basic level, is a pretty easy concept to grasp, at least for me. Add to that some creativity, thinking outside the box, and the ability to consider variations and permutations, and that's really all that I do. It doesn't feel like much. It seems that most companies treat QA pretty casually as well. For most software companies, it is an afterthought. Some places expect their developers to test their own code. Other places figure QA to be the province of interns fresh out of college. Add to that now the industry-wide thinking that QA is something that can be outsourced away completely to people who make much less money in other countries. As a result, QA seems to be the place where good people tend to get out of and become developers or project managers, or anything else except stay in QA. I am now wondering whether its time for me to do the same. I've always asked is this what I see myself doing in 20 or 30 years (wow, technically that's almost what I have left until retirement age) and the answer has always come back "*#$&*@ NO!". But I also have never had a follow-up answer to, "So what do you want to do?"
Now what makes it just a tad more complicated is that there is someone who completely depends on my ability to keep that money coming in. Not that Naomi cares right now about such things like disposable income (diapers, maybe) or our current economic level, but having a baby daughter now prevents me from even contemplating something like quitting to see what completely different career is out there. I've got mouths to feed besides my own now. (Jenn's too, since she isn't working for the moment). It feels kind of sad to think of my job as a security blanket and little else, but that's what it is becoming for me.
Is this burnout? Maybe, but I just took 6 weeks off and I haven't felt the slightest bit rejuvenated upon coming back to work. (Maybe getting in the elevator that first day back, but that's about it). I look at it this way: burnout is a relatively "new" term, historically-speaking. Did you ever hear of a farmer suffering from burnout? "Honey, I just can't milk the cow anymore" I think burnout is more of a function of whether you are doing something you enjoy. If you are, you have less of a chance of burning out. If what you do for a career isn't actually something you like, you are at higher risk.
who knows? hey, if my job is just a job, not a career, and it can provide for the time when i can get home to see my wife and my child, that's something.
Posted by spoof747 at August 3, 2005 11:24 PM