Career angst, part I

I have a good job. It's in tech support, but I have good co-workers, mostly good clients[1], am at a place that produces worthwhile goods and/or services in a nice location, there is occasional intellectual challenge to the work, the management puts their money where their mouths are with regards to work/life balance, everybody is wonderfully unpretentious when it comes to credentials[2], there's no dress code, and the pay's not bad. That's just about all of what one could want from a job, no?

Yet I am unhappy.

Realized about a year ago that what I'm missing at work is the opportunity to make things... and that I'm not going to be able to get that out of a career in I.T. I currently do have the occasion to exercise creativity in troubleshooting and writing documentation, but that's a far cry from being able to look at something cool and useful and say I made that. And what's worse is that I think I'd rather produce a tangible object -- something you can pick up, or at least kick -- than something that only exists on a computer, so most of the I.T.-related jobs that do make things (sysadmin positions with a lot of scripting or that morph into straight-up development jobs, web design, etc) are just not looking interesting. Doing network engineering is perhaps a little more appealing, but even at that top of that field (being a lead network architect for, say, AOL Time Warner or National LambdaRail) you're still just putting together routers and switches that somebody else made.[3] And going into I.T. management is right out. That rules out most of the jobs that are at least moderately connected to what I'm already doing.

So what does sound interesting?

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[1] Yeah, I hear that's pretty rare in this line of work. In part this is because I'm primarily second-tier support; somebody else usually deals with the really stupid questions before the clients get passed off to me.

[2] One great thing about a field where so many people's degrees (if they even have one) are in unrelated fields is that they care more about what you know than how you did in school. (This probably deserves its own post....)

[3] ...and as far as I know, you still have to be on call in that kind of gig, which is the other thing I really dislike about my current job.

On intuition

Now and then I run across articles in the popular press (or "diversity" articles in more technically-oriented media) exhorting people to hire/pay more attention to women because their feminine qualities will be great business assets. ("Women are nurturing! And they're so great at communication!") Am too lazy to find samples of such articles right now, but this book has the sort of sentiment I've got in mind.

As a woman who isn't so great at a lot of the stereotypically "female" things (am not a graceful speaker, tend towards social cluelessness, etc), those ideas tend to grate on my nerves. Up until a couple of years ago, the worst of these irritants was the idea of intuition as a particularly female trait. In large part this was due to the concept of "feminine intuition", that ill-defined term that seems to imply that women have some magical source of wisdom that allows them to magically and effortlessly know things. That didn't jive with my experiences, and I was insulted by the implication that I hadn't worked for my knowledge. (Inquiring minds want to know: what differentiates feminine intuition from any other kind? If I have an amazing insight as to why the router is down, does that qualify as feminine intuition?) This sort of put me off of the idea of intuition in general.

It took some comments (random asides in lectures) from two computer science professors to rehabilitate the concept enough for me to start thinking about intuition in useful ways. Ran across some useful ideas in Polya's How to Solve It; he discusses it under the heading of "subconscious work". (Hadamard's The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field, which appears to discuss the subject at length, is near the top of my long [and long-neglected] personal reading list.)

So I've finally been able to make my peace with it and not cringe everytime somebody mentions the word. I now see intuition as the subconscious taking shortcuts. It only works well when you've fed your brain enough things to make shortcuts between, and that takes a substantial investment in learning and having new experiences. But I'm still not quite sure how to deal with other people's gendered views of it....

[11/21 update: ran across an interesting post by Kathy Sierra arguing that intuition is critical for math, science, and engineering, and wondering about how that ought to affect education in those areas.]

Is this thing on?

After standing on the sidelines watching everybody else have fun, I'm giving it a shot and joining in the game. Whether I end up just playing in a corner by myself or not remains to be seen. (Preferably not, since if I wanted nothing more than a narcisisstic diary it'd be much easier to keep one on my own computer or on paper and not have to worry about pseudonymity....)

Hello, world!