Ones and Zeroes

I love IT stories. IT is such a small, close-knit community. It seems quite absurd, but it's fairly common to end up working alongside someone you worked with years before. Case in point, at my current client, there was another contractor (who isn't here anymore) who I knew from a previous job nearly 10 years before!! I also had a guy on my exact same team at two completely different jobs in two totally different cities.

So, it's probably not a good idea to piss off people you work with. Because it seems highly likely (despite how implausible it might seem) that you might end up crossing paths with them again. I believe this situation becomes even more prevalent when you start specializing in specific areas of IT. For example, I suspect the Teradata DBA community is probably a fairly close-knit group, and I have to suspect that given there are maybe a dozen companies in the country that utilize Ab Initio as their ETL tool of choice, that a great many core Ab Initio contractors probably interact with a fair amount of regularity. It's probably less of a problem for someone who just writes VB code, or C# code, as those people are a lot more common.


I had the pleasure of working alongside a guy named John when I got out of college. I'll call him John, because John is his real name. I was fresh out of college - not even 22 years old yet, and John was this sage fountain full of infinite amounts of wisdom. He was in his 50s - and had worked at a lot of places. John was planning on retiring at 55, and by all accounts, he probably is retired by now. I hope for his sake he is, at least. John was so tired of programming. He'd been doing it for so long. He used to joke with me by saying, "Let's see, if you play your cards right, maybe you could retire at 60, you're 21 now... Just think, maybe 40 more years of this." And then he would laugh at me. John had a knack for reminding me of that usually during some stressful day where we'd been chewed out by our asshole of a manager, or when I was struggling to fix a bug in some program somewhere. One of the pieces of wisdom John left me with was the idea that "It's just a job". John himself had picked up this concept from someone else, and imparted it unto me. It's nothing spectacular - but just a way to put everything into perspective. Where he'd worked once there was some threat of layoffs, and he'd gotten nervous, and a seemingly unconcerned co-worker tried to quell his fears "It's just a job", they said, "If I lose this job, I'll leave, and then I'll get another job. It's just a job."

It's very true. Informatica people are in high demand, and even if I were to get laid off, I'd find another job. It's just a job. I enjoy what I do, and I could easily do it somewhere else just as easily.

I use to have this hangup about the "kind" of place I worked. My first job out of college was retail - and all the textbook examples are retail examples. You have items, and sales, and all that other retail kinds of stuff. And just when I'd thought I'd kind of figured it all out, I left and went to work for a telecommunications company. Holy cow, that was totally different. But somewhere along the line, I'd shunned looking at places like insurance, or financial firms since I'd kind of felt like those weren't as glamorous. But then at some point, it kind of struck me once I'd got pretty good at my job in the telecommunications company - it was irrelevant. This has continued to be true everywhere I've been, even though to date I've worked retail, telecom, government, financial, briefly entertainment, and now travel. It's just data.

This is my corollary to the "It's just a job" concept. It's just data. As an Informatica programmer, I find myself caring less and less about what it is I'm moving from database to database. It's just data. It's all just 1s and 0s.