Written Off

For some reason, before I even got up this morning, I had written today off. I worked late on Wednesday anticipating going to county two today, but when it came time to make it happen, it didn't. Again I figured not having an investor to send the leads to made it not worth the time and parking money to go. I did go to courthouse one and picked up 15 leads. Pretty solid numbers for that area, but again, no investor to send them to at this point. Plans are still set to go out to a REI meeting tomorrow morning, so I'm hoping that will be productive.

I was talking to my sister last night, who has an MBA in Finance, about her job. The stuff she does and the people she works with seems so much more interesting than what I do. Plus, with a background in Computer Science and software development, I feel like I could really make some big strides in moving the Finance department of a company to the modern era. Most of the time they use plain Excel spreadsheets to do their calculations. There is very poor UI for what each field is expecting and what it means to the project as a whole. My sister showed me this cool tool she made to replace it, so I'm glad to see that someone is pushing forward and making things happen.

When I talked to her about her job it just reinforced how little I like my own. I want to blame my company because they hired me with false promises, but even so, if I wanted to I could change things. I just feel no desire to do so. I feel like I don't want to do this stuff for the rest of my life and I have no interest in it outside of doing enough to get paid. But the money is only worth so much because once I meet my financial objectives, I won't need a high salary anymore. At that point I could quit and take a lower paying job somewhere else just to get into something that I love doing. If you're doing what you love you end up getting promoted faster and it's worth more than the money. In the long run you end up ahead.

Back at my old job, when I first started working there, we were building up a new department. I spent a large amount of my days in the finance and contracts departments. I learned a lot there and was really into it. I even built a pretty elaborate Quote system that is still in use today. But then I got pulled back to doing testing and customer service and I lost a lot of my motivation. I want to do project management, working with customers, doing analysis of how a project is going and the risks it faces. That kind of thing seems exciting to me.

I do feel like this job could be tolerable if I moved back into development instead of just bug fixing. When I started here and was learning new things I was excited. I designed a security program and a few cool tools. But then I had to be placed somewhere that was billable and the guy who was mentoring me threw me to the sharks. I don't think he's even talked to me in about 2 months. So I go from actually doing and learning something to sitting on the back burner. One of the VPs told me that it was like a right of passage to do bug fixing for 6 months before you really get into anything else. That seems stupid to me though, since I'd learn a lot more if I was developing something worthwhile and interacting with multiple parts of the system. I chalk it up to poor management and bad distribution of resources.

That's enough whining from me for now. I encourage all of you out there in a position like me to not settle either. Find your passion, or make a career out of what you do with your free time. Put the time and effort into making it happen. Otherwise your financial commitments will grow around you, pinning you in. Do it now while you can because it'll only get harder. Good luck and best wishes.