The Fountainhead

At 31 I didn’t really expect to be unemployed and wanting to find regular work. I thought at this point I would have it all figured out. I would have transcended the need to take care of mundane bills and be free to focus on more interesting things. Instead I find myself fighting others for jobs just to be mediocre.

I’ve discovered that I spent way too much time educating myself. Nobody cares about a clean Model-View-Controller design with RESTful URIs behind a nice XHTML/CSS interface, with Ajax sprinkled through to improve UI response time. Yes, I also know how to build that for application for you in Perl, PHP, Java or even Tcl. I’d love to take a stab at it in Python or my beloved Ruby if you like. No system administrator, that’s fine because I know apache inside and out and Unix/Linux systems are my bitch. No database administrator, that’s fine because I know a lot about normalization, entity-relationship diagrams, indexing options of various databases, replication and high availability. No network administrator, that’s fine because I can order the line, setup the router, and configure HSRP and BGP to make sure we never lose connectivity to the Internet. Above it all I know there is a business to run so I’ll chart and diagram the hell out of this to prove that it saves/makes money.

I’ve spent all this time not only reading about that stuff, but creating opportunities to implement it. Yet time and time again I find that nobody who might hire me really cares. Do you have a degree? Do you look pretty next to the sales guy in front of clients? Can you confuse the client with marketing nonsense just enough to intimidate them into giving us more money? Can you do something crappy that works some of the time so we can get it out the door faster and cheaper?

Why have I tried at all? I’ll admit that I’ve failed to be the best at what I do, and I find it a constant struggle. Yet, why even try that when the world rewards the cheap and fast. Why be Howard Roark when you can make your life so much simpler by just being Peter Keating?