originally posted march 27, 2004
jobs have been replaced by stints
Things are going well. Work is still challenging but not overwhelming. I work 40-hour weeks on product development now, a striking change from the 60-hour weeks I spent a year ago making fixes for fixes for projects. In the 14 months that I've spent in the private sector, I've also seen many people come and go.
The title of this article comes from Douglas Coupland's "Statements to the Past," a 1995 list of statements that would be shocking to people living in 1975. As Generation X graduated from college and entered the working world, the working world adjusted itself to a new crop of workers who would no longer be "lifers" as their parents may have been. Now we live in the Internet age, and I work for a start-up. I work in web application design, a field where users should not wait more than 10 seconds for a computer to transmit a request across the Internet and receive a satisfactory response. Sometimes it seems like startup culture moves that fast.
I'm working at my first full-time job since graduating from college. I never felt too attached to a company during an internship, and summer is typically the slow time for businesses -- few companies do large hirings and firings except for the interns themselves. Last summer, three of my co-workers were suddenly dismissed within weeks of each other. Of those three only one was announced formally; most folks learned about the other two by passing two suddenly-empty cubicles. I can't say there was a climate of fear as happens during massive layoffs at large companies, but for a time I was wondering "who's next?" Thankfully, those three cases were exceptions as our company doubled in size overall in 2003.
Almost all engineers at all companies are employed at will, which essentially means that they may be quit or be fired at any time with almost any (or no) reason. In more recent months, I've seen a few co-workers suddenly disappear to take jobs elsewhere. It's really made me recognize that the tech industry has all but abandoned the concept of "lifers" as engineers willfully pick up and move themselves wherever they please.
Many people and things around our office came from failed start-ups in and around Pittsburgh. Less than a week after local company AcceLight Networks went out of business, our cupboard had a dozen coffee mugs bearing AcceLight's name. Several nice chairs and couches in our office came from another startup called InfoSAGE, as did many of our employees. One of our assistant administrators, himself an "alumnus" of several small companies, ominously told me in December that I "won't retire" from this company. His words were eerily prescient, as he himself was suddenly let go in January. The trend for tech startups five years ago was to make billions off an IPO and go bust shortly thereafter. Nowadays, a small company is more likely to seek a buyer after achieving success.
Personally, I feel comfortable where I am. I have a good place to live here, plenty of friends living nearby, and a good job with a company that is growing. Seeing a company and its employees turn on a dime is the reason why, when faced with a choice between a huge software company and a small one, I chose the small company. This is going to be a good run, no matter where and when it ends.
Back to March 2004, or to the year 2004.
![[weill aspects]](/aspects/small-logo.png){kind=logo}
![[Back to home]](/GLOBE.GIF){kind=small}