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Australia – the Burning Urge to Migrate

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The temptation to pack up and move to Australia has never been stronger. I can’t explain why – I have never really been one of those people who fantasizes about or even wanted to go to Australia, let alone live in Australia or work there. The heat, the poisonous insects and snakes, etc.

New Zealand, on the other hand, is a completely different story. I went through the entire skilled migrant process with New Zealand at one point and then just decided against it – mostly because of the most basic reason possible: distance.

When you tell people (especially Americans) that you live in Iceland, they imagine someplace remote, difficult to get to, distant. Yet, despite the fact that the lands down under are more than twice as far, people imagine some kind of nearness or kinship – perhaps because these countries are English speaking, are more in the headlines, seem friendlier and less forbidding? It’s hard to say why (other than the dismal state of the average American’s knowledge of geography). It seemed far more reasonable to them when I was plotting out a move to Christchurch than to Reykjavik.

I’d say I’ve exhibited a fair amount of perspicacity when it comes to making decisions based on the so-called “writing on the wall”. I am fairly observant and think – and act – on things that appear to be in the offing. For example, when things start to shift significantly in the workplace, I sense it and start evaluating options – I don’t want to be blindsided.

But there is very little deeply intellectual understanding informing this growing urge to move to Australia. I have halfheartedly thought about it in years past, but suddenly in the last six months, the pull is very strong.

The biggest hurdle, which is something I have never wanted to face again in my life, is the immigration part. The bureaucracy and paperwork and endless steps in the process – all perfectly surmountable, if expensive. Easier if one had a job offer and sponsorship/employer nomination, but as a communications and marketing manager, writer or even as a technical marketing and user documentation writer/manager, I am not really a prime candidate for employer sponsorship. I am not a tech worker; I am not a healthcare worker – even if I have worked in these fields, I have never been a programmer or a nurse. And I don’t work directly in any of the in-demand fields for which Australia has a shortage.

In any case, the desire is there with strange dreams of Melbourne.

Harbingers of Techie Doom – Skipping Humanity

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Circulating on the web is an article called “Young Techies – Know Your Place” by Bryan Goldberg. He contends that it’s a great piece of satire (a point that has been lambasted, in particular by Andrew Leonard at Salon and Jason Calacanis).

It’s hard to sum up concisely all the things that are wrong with the so-called “satire”.

It reminds me a lot of debates about whether athletes should finish school before they go pro – or grab the opportunity when they have it. In those cases, the window and scope of opportunity (and probability of getting injured) indicates that young athletes should probably seize the chance while they have it. You have all your life to go back to school later.

The same could be said of young techies – and we could all embrace the idea that formal education can be had any time (granted, it gets harder to fit into your life as you get older and have more responsibilities, but at the same time, many new high school grads really are not mature enough to invest the kind of money in college that they do and end up wasting a lot of money and dropping out or spending a lot of money and still coming out without a clue about what they want to do). If a person has the tech skills needed and in-demand and can gain valuable work experience – well-paid or not – that’s great. I don’t think anyone is saying that that should not be a personal choice.

However, Calacanis succinctly pointed out the insensitivity and lack of humanity in Goldberg’s argument: “polarization of wealth & unemployment are important issues of our time–not something to be a smug about”.

It is not as though people are not routinely priced out of living in certain cities (this has always been a problem, to varying degrees, in San Francisco, New York, London, Paris). But to laud the ability to drive prices up (rather artificially) not only sounds smug but points out clearly what these young techies may be missing in their makeup: humanity and compassion.

Humanity and compassion cannot be taught in school or in a menial job, but so much of what happens at university, as an example, is sociological learning, analysis, learning to think and process new kinds of information, emotional maturity, character building. A lot of what happens when you work in “menial 8-dollar-an-hour” jobs is a kind of learning how to live a grounded, down-to-earth life. That’s not to say everyone has to do that to understand. It is just that “jumping to the front of the line” and being smug about it – and not at all considering the larger-scale repercussions for all people – of any “revolution” (in this case a geographically restricted tech revolution that is upending real-estate/housing stability) – denies the idea that poverty or becoming one of the working poor is something that could happen to anyone. While it is not particularly likely for many of the young techies, there is something about lacking well-roundedness or lacking the connectedness to a community, that is alarming. Or, maybe it is not their disconnectedness – as much as it seems to be the disconnectedness of the guy writing on their behalf – satirically, as he claims.

Val Kilmer is Still Alive & Perilous Winter Commutes

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I am not psychic. Evidence of this: Val Kilmer is still alive.

That said, I have some common sense (sometimes). I did not need to be psychic to know that I was going to have to take a longer route to work to ensure a safer route to work.

During the weekend, the weather turned to the typical cold, snowy Swedish winter one expects. Coming off a vacation and not really wanting to go back (I live about three hours by car from where I work and commute in on Monday mornings, leaving on Thursday afternoons), I envisioned the horrible road conditions on the road I normally take (a road I don’t like in ideal conditions). It winds and twists, is hilly, and wild animals, especially gigantic moose, pop out suddenly at every turn. In warm, decent weather, this is dangerous enough. In the middle of the night, at -7C with snow and ice covering the ground, a recipe for disaster. I also did not imagine that anyone cleared that highway – so I drove a good 100 kms out of my way so I could take Norwegian roads. You read that right. I crossed from Sweden into Norway, drove about 150 kms, and crossed back into Sweden to the south. Most of the drive, this way, was motorway that had been cleared and ultimately only tacked one hour onto the overall drive – although one hour is one hour. A train might have been doable but really not the best option this week.

Beyond that, “ice is evil” according to some dude named Doug.

And now, during my vacation, my work network password expired, so I can’t log in. Right now it is not important since I am sitting in the parking lot of the office waiting for it to open. Really need to rethink this nonsense.

Muppet Family Christmas and Back to Work

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A friend mentioned he had seen The Muppet Family Christmas for the first time and linked to it… and I was elated. I LOVE this special and had never been able to find it anywhere. Now I can get over the funk I’m in of having to return to work.

Best thing ever! Can anything compete with something that has Oscar the Grouch, The Count, Cookie Monster AND the Swedish Chef in it? (And all the rest of the Muppet, Sesame Street and Fraggle Rock gang?)

"No, I'll be nicely miserable in my trash can here."

“No, I’ll be nicely miserable in my trash can here.”

Work Life – Retreading the Repetitive Inertia – “My transformers are gone”

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“Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve –
Hope without an object cannot live.”
–Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“I’m a broken television on a Neukölln street,
That dog over there just pissed on me.
My screen is cracked, my transformers are gone,
I was state-of-the-art until it all went wrong…”

-SONIC CONTROL “Broken Television on a Neukölln Street” (listen – loud!)

Corporate life without dynamism and real decisions made and implemented (that is, backed up with real action) makes one inert – the planning for planning for planning to change for a change that never really comes. A lot of processes, developing processes and storing these storied processes somewhere (where? Some barely functioning, buggy database? Some bespoke little system that the company pats itself on the back for contracting the creation of – not realizing it is not scalable, not usable, not changeable, not modular, not portable, not mobile, not user friendly, etc. etc. A system that was not only expensive but so individual to the company’s needs that it cannot be applied outside the system or the company and any upgrades have to be done by the same original developer – and what should the company have learned in these cases, given that they repeat this mistake again and again, except that the company is a cash cow being milked for all its technical naivete and lack of technical competence is worth?)

The inertia also comes from a lot of talk about change management – but what change are we actually managing? The churn of the upper execs brought in to “change” things? To talk endlessly about change and innovation that no one has a clue how to implement – talk is cheap. Innovation is a buzzword, and if it is really meant to exist throughout the organization, an organization needs (supposedly) to find ways to work differently, communicate differently, be leaner. But this is all too often just a lot of talk. The push to innovate adds an extra layer of talk, endless meetings, pressure to do something without any idea what while the true organizational structure, the way it works and the people it hires, is not leaner, is not better suited to the needs of the future, is less transparent and even the simplest of “yeses” are really “nos”. Usually no one person has the chutzpah or cojones to say yes, mean it and back it up or to just say no and stick to it. Reality is in the corporate netherworld in between where decisions are half-made in committees that then must present to another committee. All that is left to show for this endless process is months and years of wasted time and really crappy PowerPoint presentations that no one will ever look at again.

If a company, for example, is going to place all its eggs in the “future-oriented” basket – then IT probably needs to be woven into the whole organization – not just SAP and supply chain issues, for example. It actually needs to be integrated with every part of the business (at least relevant people need to know what effect business decisions will have on IT systems and needs and vice versa). That means that a company-wide change cannot be vague and “IT-oriented”, heralded loudly and visibly as a major priority and then in reality set adrift on a rickety raft, isolated from the rest of a company, guided by competent but unqualified and junior-level teams without any authority. Change cannot be something guided by an organization instructing: “Turn this raft into a luxurious cruise ship that everyone will want to board. Here’s 1,000 dollars to do it.” Creativity and ingenuity go a long way – even assigning people who do not necessarily come from the “right” background suited to these fields can be a smart asset – getting new perspectives and ways of doing things but not if these people are not provided the resources and support to really implement the change.

One colleague referred to much of this as herding cats. I also thought of the way things in the corporate world operate when I was watching the film My Week with Marilyn today, when Kenneth Branagh as Laurence Olivier yells something like, “teaching Marilyn to act is like teaching Urdu to a badger”. Corporate life seems to be a lot about forcing people into roles that are just not made for them – or roles that no one could succeed in or giving roles that are absolutely beyond the knowledge, experience and expertise of those given the roles, but no one knows or cares because those filling the roles are “yes men” and “yes women”, who buy into the game, who speak the lingo and don’t really care if things really get done.

The frustrating part, which renders the people of such a corporation inert, is that they sink a lot of time and work into efforts that are ultimately thwarted because there is no “big plan” or at least nothing that is backed by real resources. It is just like running in a hamster wheel – or worse, a rat maze from which no one is quite sure there is an exit. If a company could employ clarity and honesty from the start – that might make a difference. As one person said to me, a company could just admit that they are a hot dog stand and aim to be the best hot dog stand instead of being a hot dog stand striving to be a fine-dining establishment. The company is just playing in the wrong league, the wrong ballpark – maybe even the wrong game. Possibly the wrong decade – management with traditional ideas that were state-of-the-art in the 1970s and IT solutions that were cutting edge in 1998.

The feeling of employees beaten down by this machine, beating their heads against the wall, can only create frustration, unhappiness and eventually apathy.

Maybe it is not apathy so much at that point as it is  – why would one do something that is the antithesis of what they want to do? One can survive and thrive in some other way without the daily sense that nothing they do is going to matter.

After watching the documentary Hit So Hard, I was inspired to reread an article about Generation X heading into middle age, and it struck me that most people in my generation are somewhat apathetic (even if they are smart, hard workers). They don’t want to step up somehow because the world during their lives presented one crisis after another – and this corporate “thing” just isn’t our thing. (“‘If anything,” says Wendy Fonarow, a social anthropologist and the author of the indie-rock chronicle Empire of Dirt, “our generation is characterized by not hitting a wall of midlife crisis but having crises throughout.’” Also: “‘The problem is, with adulthoods repeatedly shipwrecked by economic disasters, Xers might have neglected to track the crossing over. Susan Gregory Thomas, author of the resonant memoir In Spite of Everything, says that many Xers ‘are always living in a state of triage, always in a survivalist mode. We’re not thinking long-term.’”)

Many people in this generation have created their own businesses – many doing innovative things that enable working without compromising. Experience shows that we can find greater satisfaction if we have a certain amount of flexibility, if we are steering the ship – sometimes completely outside the confines of the “corporate box”. We can be compliant team players and prolific, engaged contributors – but not within a box.

For me individually, I don’t want to spend my life, my time, my effort contributing to hypocritical institutions that bow down to how things have always been done. I won’t give lip service to – and give my service to – something that is just sort of like putting a patch on a sinking raft. I want to get on a robust – even if small – ship and move full steam ahead (although I don’t mind the old-fashioned way of doing things and the knowledge and experience needed to do things in another or older way).

Maybe I am not thinking in the long-term because it has never done me any good to do so. No amount of planning can insulate one from economic reality or from disposability. I will undoubtedly always choose to do what is best for me personally and professionally, which for me has been a path toward freelancing or, ideally, full-time virtual/remote work. I have become a vocal proponent, near “activist” of sorts, for this. Sure, the virtual work concoction is one part selfish, i.e. I am more productive, healthier and happier working at home. But it is also another part driven by other considerations – our globalized world is under financial and environmental pressures, for one thing.

While this makes little difference perhaps for someone who lives in the same city as they work, it has become important to me as I have observed a large part of the “global” staff commute in from different countries on a weekly basis just to attend a few meetings and have a presence in the global HQ. Yes, people are literally flying in every single week. There is a tremendous environmental cost to this – and for what? These travel and housing expenses are covered by the company – so when the entire employee base is constantly prodded to think of smarter, more efficient, less expensive ways to work – this seems like an obvious, hitting-the-nail-on-the-head no-brainer. Technology has progressed to the point that I imagined telecommuting and virtual workforces would be a much more integrated and normal thing by now but it is instead working the other way. I don’t see the value if looking in a sheer cost-benefit manner in maintaining this commuting workforce, some of whom literally show up for one afternoon to attend one meeting. If the expertise of these staff is that valuable, fine. But how on earth does this excessive travel make sense? How is this lean or well-organized?

“I was state-of-the-art until it all went wrong…” (SONIC CONTROL)