Flashes of Panic

I was talking about career paths with friends in Boston this weekend. Most of this group of friends are older than I am, and I often wind up playing the smart-ass kid with them, which has its moments.

So I wasn’t quite sure how seriously to take it when one of them started insisting that I had to come work for her. She’s got some exalted management title at one of the gargantuan financial firms in the area, running some team of IT people. And she pitches a good case: though her office is in Boston, her team is up in the part of New Hampshire which is, for all intents and purposes, in Massachusetts. They use about every database package known to humanity (Oracle, MS-SQL, Sybase, PostGres, MySQL, Interbase, DB2, and for all I know Filemaker and FoxPro.) They move staggering amounts of data around the world on an hourly basis, and this is the team with the tools. She claimed corporate support for continuing education, as well (and, whatever bad things I may say about my previous employer, they would reimburse tuition for nearly any course you could reconcile with your job, whereas I’m on my own with Westfield.)

I doubt I’ll even ask if she was kidding or not. I rather like what I’m doing here right now, and I suspect that I’ll be best-off, when I finally get rolling in grad school, if I try to do that one thing well rather than letting coursework be just one of the flaming torches I juggle.

Still, it’s tempting, and I think the temptation is an insight to what I really want out of this degree. What I like doing is solving puzzles. Putting the pieces together and watching them go. To do that on a larger scale, I need tools.

Right now, I’m doing pretty well in that direction, because running a network of thirty-five (or so) nodes and five servers is really just a large-scale application of the same tools you use to run a high-powered home office. When you step up and start with applications that require load-balancing and fat-pipe networking and things like that… well, that’s another big step beyond where I am now. There are a lot of tools out there which I have access to even now, which I don’t really know how to use, and then there are more which I know we don’t need, so I don’t really know them.

I think more than knowing how to use the tools, I need the experience and knowledge to judge which tools are right for the situation. And be able to make my own, if necessary. It’s fun and fulfilling to do a whole lot of little stuff here, but wouldn’t it also be fun to wrangle the really big iron?

In this way, I’m of a similar mind to Dorothea—I don’t research things. I do things, and I learn them when I need to do them (and often by doing them.) I think that’s a serious warning signal when it comes to the kind of degree that begins with “P.” And that scares me too.

And maybe when I get out I can really be a dwarf, and

spen[d] a lot of time in the dark hammering out beautiful things, e.g. Rings of Power.

Now playing: Everlong from The Colour And The Shape by Foo Fighters