The “Ugly Spouse” IT Job and One United Bank Follow up
The comments from “jimndudley” and “klafatec” for “The One United Bank Experiment” open a whole subject for today. Their basic message is one of optimism and I daresay youth. You see, kids (no matter how old you are), evaluating the technology skills of a company is just like evaluating the musicianship skills of a group of performers. You have to look real hard to find a person who is unwilling to pass judgment on a piece of music because they are not sure what they just heard. When you have such an experience, you get a general feeling that something is not quite right—or it’s just right. You do not have to worry about your level of education to evaluate your experience.
The same should apply to the realm of information technology. My experience with the artifacts of the technical culture of One United Bank gave me the general feeling that something is not quite right. This also applies, by the way, to my experience with paying bills online at Los Angeles Department of Water and “Power” website (there should not be a seven-dollar fee to have the “privilege” of paying a bill). Password length should not be so small for entry into the Washington Mutual Cards site. It should not be so goddamn hard to find the bill payment website for Time Warner Cable! So it is clear that Kevin Cohee is not being singled out because his business shortcomings are unique—quite the contrary: my disappointment is that Kevin Cohee is quite the average American when it comes to presenting an online business.
When a comment is directed to me even vaguely suggesting that Kevin Cohee is going to give me a “chance” to work with him, I might as well work for white people. Because this smacks of the white drama sold to me quite frequently in the IT workplace. It goes like this: “Bryan, you are here because we are doing you a favor so we will exploit you because that is a privilege and we will not invest anything in you because it is not worth it.” This is the horrible Catch22 situation many IT workers get put in regardless of their skin color. My response to this situation of exploitation was not my plan at all. It came quite by chance a few years ago (largely due to events surrounding 9/11 and the Dotcom Bust) and it is called, ‘The Ugly Spouse Company.’
An ‘Ugly Spouse Company’ is a company that is not attractive to qualified people looking for jobs. The ‘Ugly Spouse’ IT job is a job that does not pay well (by six-figure IT standards) so no young, computer science graduate with any sense of self decency would dare approach. This means that we relatively old guys are left among the slots as the huge bureaucratic ship sails along slowly. We could all be sailing along to our deaths or we can use the lull in political intrigue and vicious infighting to carefully hone our IT skills. We can experiment with large-scale deployments that no one fresh out of MIT cares about… We can switch/mix/match technologies, set up small labs and study openly in our cubicles because the middle managers are always in meetings about someone else’s money—and they come back and tell us that the project start date slipped again!
Meanwhile, the Kevin Cohee’s of the world are counting every penny and expecting near minute-to-minute intense performance from IT workers. When these intense people produce excellent work, I have absolutely no problem with this. I have demonstrated my high performance in the workplace and am personally satisfied with my abilities and capabilities. But the price American’s pay for this slave-heritage American way is that the IT workers burn out—they get clear cut down to irrelevant, out-of-date skills because they were not provided with time to keep up to date through continuing education. And what is ultimately maddening is to work so hard to produce crap—the only psychological refuge for being so dishonored and intellectually raped is the big-buck paycheck and few trappings of wealth (real wealth means you don’t have to show up for other people’s work in the first place).
The certainty with me is that it would not have been possible for me to make the transition out of my ASP/COM cash cow into the new world of Microsoft .NET—and, lately, Java—without my dependable, quiet, Ugly Spouse. And, as previous Blog posts suggest, I certainly would have crumbled under the pressure of personal problems as well. Since my employment at the Ugly Spouse Company, two of my three children have been born! It has been almost seven years… Only one IT headhunter keeps tabs on me now… Much appreciation, Natt… Much respect for your help…
So the merciless stereotype that the irretrievable victims of patriarchy heap on us males is that we are always plotting to cheat on our significant other. We are always greedily looking over the hill wondering about grass greener… Since this stereotype seems so inescapable let it then apply to this Ugly Spouse Company. She has nothing to suspect from me because all that she asks (and she asks relatively little) I produce for her—but behind her back I am out on the streets looking for my Dream Girl Company. My strategic position and relative lack of greed puts me in a position to be authentically demanding. When the intense guys look at my résumé with its six-year lull, they can write me off as one who is “lazy” and they can move on to other potential victims of “real American business”—or we can sit down and talk about putting theory into practice and turning theory quickly into dollars and cents after years of slow practice. When all else fails, we can perhaps negotiate a one-night stand. Telecommuting anyone?
Track my self-investment process with my top-level RSS feed at SonghaySystem.com.