One of the things that drives me crazy about the place where I work is that I don't get to be a techie. That's what I used to be, at a prior company, and its what I like to do, but it's not my job, you see; its not what I was hired to do, and for all of the time that I've been there, its been the position of the people that I work for that while its nice that I can do these other things, its not what they're paying for. Consequently, when I do something useful in that line, its treated as not much more than an amusing trick, not to be rewarded or regarded of value.
Its only been lately that it occurs to me that this might be a good thing. I'm having a little trouble swallowing that concept, but here's how it's been playing out in my mind, lately.
I'm a decent technician, but I'm not a superior one. I do well at what I do, but I don't excel at it, either in volume of output or quality of output. My one strength is that I am dammed persistent. I will look and look and look again, I will walk around in the parking lot thinking about what I'm trying to solve, I will take breaks from one thing to poke around a little on the thing I'm trying to solve. When I do solve the puzzles I'm trying to solve, which is about eighty percent of the time, its about two thirds ability and one third persistence.
There's a little curiosity in there, too. I wonder about things that other people don't seem to wonder about. I wonder how that works, I'll think, or I wonder why it does that. Usually, the wondering doesn't lead anywhere, but every so often, it turns up something interesting. If I think its useful, I tell other people via an email to the group. They almost always don't acknowledge it, which leads me to wonder if they find it useless or just don't think it's worth acknowledging. I've never asked, though I've wondered.
So, given that analysis, I have to admit that there isn't anything about my ability that would make a manager say Damn, this is someone that I really want, someone who, if they want to be in my group, I'll make sure I get. Granted, it seems that most managers have a very cut-and-dried view of their jobs, last couple of years; it seems to consist overwhelmingly of satisfying whatever the current desires of their manager might be. It does not consist of making me happy. Sometimes, when I'm in a grumpy mood, I think it consists of making me unhappy, but when I come out of the grump, I realize that thats silly. They don't care enough about me to want to make me either happy or unhappy.
If I did make it into a group where people did tech stuff routinely, the standards for what qualifies as decent would be higher. So, if I made the transition, I'd have to work harder and be judged harder. The things I do now that I think are exceptional (and they are, relative to the group I'm in) would be normal, even trivial.
I'm not sure how I'd do in that environment. I wonder if I'd find out that my semi-bleak personal assessment is true. How would I feel if people whose skills I admired didn't admire mine?
3 comments:
I used to do that. Think about what could go wrong with an airplane, and how I would go about finding the problem and fixing it. This just got me too nervous to go flying! Then I changed my approach to something like...."Operator found a snag....is it really a snag, or is it symptomatic of something else, something bigger. My thought processes would go something like this....here is a real snag I faced once.
Evidence of hydraulic leaking on main landing gear...fix...pick one of the below....
evidence of leak removed
Leak measured and found to be within tolerance
Leak determined to be from somewhere else, that is, something other than the landing gear is faulty.
Ground the aircraft, cancel its flights, and tear down the main landing gear looking for a major malfunction.
Which option would you choose? How bout if you were the airline owner?
How much wishful thinking would suddenly get involved?
How many times could you ground the aircraft for piddling little details before they take you off the floor?
How long would I work if I spent my time finding hydraulic leaks instead of repairing the radios...my primary job.
The second question I would ask...has this happened before? What went wrong last time?
The third question I would ask...how important is this problem....like, can the aircraft fly without that extra coffee pot working? (no, that really happened..it was a "major" snag...one that the aircraft would not be able to fly without being repaired according to the pilot.)
The fourth question I would ask would be...."If I fix it, do I get the credit?" "Do I want the credit, or should I just do the work, and let somebody else "find" the problem? A couple reasons for doing the latter...maybe the fix will cause the tech to work late, maybe the fix will cause the aircraft to be grounded....making the techie the fall guy....maybe I like the techie and want to do him a favor....maybe that "may" be the problem, they will have to ground the aircraft to be sure, and if it's NOT the problem, heads will roll. See...lots of reason to let other's take the credit/blame.
This sort of thing caused me to make some serious troubleshooting styles. It also enabled me to keep an eye on the techies when I suddenly found myself in charge of a couple squads of them. And also it enabled me to seem like a genius when they would work for hours trying to find the problem, and I would go in, find it inside of an hour, and tell them to fix it. It didn't hurt to develop some personal "half split signal" methods of fault finding which look like magic. Therefore I looked like a hot tech without actually having to be one.
Why would you do a tech's work for him if you don't get any credit? You just a company man (Its okay...I was...) or you figure somebody will actually like you to make them look foolish?
One of my minor conceits is that by thinking about potential problems, or by wondering how things work, it makes me better at what I do.
Sometimes it does.
Sometimes, all it does is drive me crazy.
Most people would agree that it DID drive ME crazy.
Grin!
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