Anyway, enough of my ramblings; I’d like to know what some of your ‘dreams and ambitions’ or career choices were that led you to where you are now in life:
I got where I am today because I drew on some beer coasters in a bar. True story.
Q. Are you satisfied with what you have in your current career, or how would you like to change and what do you like about your job?
Hm, I guess not. I’m being paid minimum wage; I don’t have any front-end colleagues with which I can discuss code/ideas/problems/solutions (only you guys, lawlz); my code goes from my end to the online server without maintaining its integrity (though it’s way better than a year or two ago… back then I had a different word for what happened to my code. Let’s say that word rhymes with “cape”); even when there’s a design and front-end code I’m proud of, the bosses are such freaking Google sycophants that they regularly pervert the content into something rather unreadable “for teh googlez”, which kinda breaks any usability in the pages; and often they are spending so much time signing up our sites to “social networking” places (good god they made accounts on LinkedIn… WHY??? They’re not looking for employees, they’re looking for customers! Arg) that trying to get any content from them is worse than pulling teeth from an angry pitbull. Also, learning other things is mostly on my own time, and I’d like to be learning more stuff (esp Javascript) on the job. I’d love to be able to do actual user testing on our sites, but that will never, ever happen. Instead, it’ll be trial-and-error like now: people calling because something was confusing, and knowing that for every one who calls, there are a bunch of others who didn’t bother calling and just went to someone else’s site.
I’m unmotivated and bored, and regularly consider getting a job cleaning toilets in offices or something (what’s holding me back? Most uitzendbureaus with those sorts of jobs want me to have a car… and I don’t even have a license!). Also, when I look around at places I might want to work, I see the same sh*tty code in the front end that I see everywhere else a lot of the time, because they too are using some kind of template/CMS… which is something I kinda more expect from people’s nephews rather than Internet Bureaus. So I feel like I must be wasting my time being all picky about semantic, lean, valid and accessible code: people are getting paid way more than I just plugging in some Drupal module and adding a few more “block clear-block clear-clear block-block-block” classes to everything.
And while maybe I could increase the quality of some other employer, they’re really not looking for someone like me… not unless I get off my butt and learn XSLT, jQuery (not Javascript… jQuery), PHP, C#, .NET, Flash/ActionScript3, and maybe some mobile stuff like Java and Objective C. Lawlz, and what’s funny is I’d love to learn Perl. Which is just not a popular language with Internet Bureaus.
On the other hand, I could just spend all day scrolling through icanhazcheeseburger.com and get paid my minimum wage if I wanted to. Or just not show up at all. I’m not sure they’d notice. I have a mortgage though so I guess I keep going.
Or I could see if I end up working somewhere where people care about code.
Q. Was your current career choice in the ‘same field’ where you started off at, or and is it your ambition to branch out and discover other niches?
As a teenager, I wanted to be a paleontologist (how I met my husband). Dinosaurs are cool, science is cool, even scraping away little grains of sand with a dental pick in the hot sun for hours on end is cool (yeah that’s what they do, none of this crazy Indiana Jones stuff). That kinda died when I realised I’d have to be rich enough to get into some University where they had stuff like Geology courses.
So I became a radiologic technologist (the person who actually takes the X-rays/does the CAT scans, and yes, it will always be CAT for me… don’t let their new terminology fool you, those images are still “assisted” and “axial”!) and did that for a few years. I enjoyed it, and I was fast, but there was lots of bad management (seems endemic) plus while I get along fine with colleagues and x-ray machines, I guess I’m just too weird for patients… I freaked them out and I got kicked out. Arg, I need to stay away from anything customer-service-ish. I’m not good at reading what people expect (ever been in a hospital? Everything that pissed you off about the nurses and other staff, someone else was equally pissed about exactly the opposite).
Anyway later I wandered into web development. I almost started school for electrician, but at the last minute my current employer offered me a year-contract (4 years now). Not sure what I’ll do next. Like I said, maybe toilet cleaner.
Q. What would be your ‘dream type of job’ if you weren’t stuck in your current pair of shoes or could change your past and do things again?
I dunno if I have a dream job. I would want to be doing something I’m good at, with as little BS in the management as possible, and no 80-hour workweeks (unless it was that fun).
I’ve considered joining an orchestra and playing the horn (I’d have to get back to my old level, and then some)… or becoming an electrician (though here in the Netherlands, there’s a lot of sex segregation… not legally, but all the women do stupid boring female jobs and all the men do cool awesome jobs for some reason), or maybe programmer (if I have any ability there). Meteorologist? I used to love weather science. I suppose if I had known earlier in my life that I’d like to be a paleontologist, I would have worked harder at school so that I would maybe have good enough grades etc to get a scholarship… but that realisation came too late and I was a mostly lazy and uninspired student (I passed by acing the tests, but I rarely did the homework).
Q. Would you consider yourself a “one career (wo)man” or do you fall into the “I ain’t no one career (wo)man” category?
I have one career: earning crappy wages doing menial things and wondering if it’s because I suck.
