Last May I was weighing a few things related to my job: was I in a job advancing in accordance with my goals?  Should I leave to start my own business?  Was I willing to take the associated risks, given how our family financials are structured?

As it turns out, as the year went on, I discovered I was in the wrong company.  I did advance in my job, and began to see that the “quirks” I’d seen in my company as a technical contributor were a bit tougher to take in my new role as a spokesperson in the company.  It’s one thing to be in a role where you think the company’s doing things differently than you’d do them; it’s another thing to be one of the folks whose job it is to do those things.  I ended up deciding to leave.

You may notice that someone commented on that post.  That someone turns out to be my new CEO.  We both think we know each other reasonably well, having worked together before.  He knows that I’m a good great addition to his company, and I know that he runs a great company, one that I’m proud to be associated with.  As I interact with some of the people he’s brought into his new company, I’m even more impressed.

John’s comment was that he wasn’t sure if I would actually want to start a company, that I should examine my reasons.   I’ll admit that those reasons have always been of the sort “when I start my company, I’ll do it differently than..”.    I think companies should behave in certain ways, and do certain things…

Behave in certain ways… do certain things… nebulous words worthy of much more than I’m willing to go into here this evening.  Worthy of more explanation for my own sake.  All I’ll say is that the story I keep telling folks about what attracted me to this company is that in my first meeting with the team, before I was interviewing with them, I got into a discussion of business as a ministry opportunity and what that would look like.  That I could have that conversation with that group of people highly impresses me and convinces me I’m in the right place.  If I’m in the right place, though, I need to consider whether the “one [I] might consider” is my destiny.  At the moment, at least, it’s the place I’m delighted to get the opportunity to help grow, and to grow with.

Within the last month, I’ve been promoted to a team leadership / manager’s position.  Within our company, that gives me responsibility for people, budget, and client management, as well as gives me additional opportunities and responsibilities for supporting the overall health and development of my company.  This is exactly what I’ve looked for, and is a defining step in my career.  You’re never hired into one of these positions unless you can demonstrate you’ve done it well before, so it’s a significant step forward.  It’s also a milestone for me in determining whether I have or can develop the skills and talents to start my own business.  All in all, a good thing, though like in any job, there’ve already been a few challenges more significant than just the daily bustle.

Leadership challenge #1:  [can’t talk it about it here until the fullness of time has passed].  Will update later, but is causing me to stretch and weigh commitments to team members versus commitment to company, and determine whether I’m serving my office well.  If I’m not, I need to figure that out quickly.

Leadership challenge #2:  a new company policy came out that is unexpected.  There’s no argument that it’s within the company’s rights to establish such a policy.  There’s some debate in my mind as to whether it’s in the company’s best interests overall.  It’s distinctly not in the employees’ favor, which makes my leadership job a bit more interesting, particularly since I get the copy of the policy at the same time as everyone else and have no more insight into its reasoning or intended application.

Just jotting these down to remind myself of interesting items and dilemnas.  When / if it’s appropriate, I may fill in details for my few readers and figure out how I did versus should have handled these things.

Off to work to see what the day holds!  And reminding myself that there are no surprises to the One who’s allowed me to step into this role.  May my service be useful.

An article link dropped in my in-bin reads “Should Remote Workers Earn More?“.  First reaction: h*** no!  (Note: I haven’t yet read the article yet – will give my reaction/thinking, and then see if the article offers any insights I hadn’t considered.)

Argument 1: Remote workers don’t have the same commuting expenses as do local workers.  Thus their compensation package doesn’t need to cover that cost of going to work.  (Counter argument: but you need to set up a home office, which does cost more.  Some of that may be covered by tax breaks for home offices, I imagine, though I’m no tax expert.)  Still come down on: no, don’t pay remote workers more.

Argument 2: Remote workers don’t have the same office distractions as do local workers, and thus are more productive.  Hmmm….  if that’s true, then that better performance would be rewarded by greater pay, regardless of the locale.  But no ipso facto relationship: if it is an effect, then better pay should be granted, but until said effect is indicated, no better pay.

Argument 3: The local office doesn’t have to pay for the cost of the office space of the worker, and thus that worker is cheaper, in terms of overhead expenses.  Ergo, the company can pay more for the remote worker.  One, that logic only works if a significant portion of your labor force works from home: no one can shift their expense structure that much for one worker being in or out of the office.  Two, so what?  If it costs me less as a company to utilize you, that doesn’t mean that you get the money.  It may mean you get more opportunities to work, because my profit rate for you is higher, but that doesn’t mean I have to share it with you.

Argument 4:  Hey, working from home is less burdensome for the employee…  It’s a perk (no commute, no dress code, flexibility in hours), that ought to be considered as part of the total compensation package.  By that logic, the remote worker should actually get paid _less_.  If one perk goes up, and that employee is comparable to other employees, the pay package ought to go down.

All arguments, before reading the article, still lead me to the “employees might be willing to take a pay cut to work from home” rather than “employees should get a pay raise to work from home”.  (Note: I could only intermittently work from home, as I have 3 kids at home: productivity with a 2 year old running around just isn’t high on any sustained basis.)

Aha: the article uses the term “remote worker” to mean the guy who works a regular day job, and then is expected to bring work home at night.  The argument against paying these folks more is that “Show me one employee who doesn’t waste time at work,” the Colorado-based author said. “I see so much abuse of working hours by employees—personal phone calls, socializing, checking eBay listings, booking personal travel, etc.—that I don’t believe it’s unreasonable for an employer to want a bit of work on personal hours.“.  Hmmmm….  isn’t that more of a cultural/management issue, that unwanted behaviors are occurring on the clock?  That doesn’t mean you get to change the clock, particularly without specific evidence on an individual basis: ok, you took away 2 hours of “my” time, I’m going to take away 2 of yours.  (Sounds like a parenting punishment I’ve used before, actually.) Particularly since in reality it’s more like, OK, you may have taken away some amount of hours of”my” time, so I now have carte blanche to require additional hours of yours.

Note that I’m one of those sick twisted individuals who has a need to keep abreast of the field, checks her email constantly, and would probably be very addicted to a Crackberry, were I to have one.  So I’m a remote worker, just by nature.  But I do it for me, for my own twisted personality deficiencies.  I feel very strongly that I don’t “owe” that to my employer, and were an employer to ever indicate that I owed it to them in any large measure, I’d indicate that there is no compensation package large enough to cover such an agreement.  Folks quibble over vacation time in compensation packages, but allow employment overage to eat into just plain ol’ life time.

So to bring it full circle, using their definition of “remote worker”, yes, remote workers should EITHER be paid more, or work less at work.  Either way to solve the equation works for me.  But if remote workers are required to work more, over and above, just at home rather than at work, then they should definitely be paid more.  They should assess the likely hours burden over the year, and use that times their approximate hourly rate to determine what they should be compensated.

These kinds of opinions make me unpopular with services companies.  One day, when I have my own company, this post may come back to bite me when I’m older/wiser/burdened by realities of business, rather than just the philosophies of business.  I hope I hold true to my statements.

Very nice post on Brazen Careerist entitled ‘Seven Reasons why graduate school is outdated‘.  I’d like to add to her comments with a few items as to why I believe grad school isn’t as useful as I once thought.  These thoughts are shaped by both my own experiences in an MBA program (either on hold or abandoned, based on the time demands of it versus family life) and discussions with folks in Masters programs in Computer Science:

* Those who rise to the top seem to do so based on leadership and communication skills, neither of which seem to be to be readily teachable in a classroom setting.  These both seem to be shaped through use, and by watching others who succeed in those skills, rather than reading about Laslow’s hierarchy of needs.

* Reading and experimentation sticks much more when done on your own time, own interests, and in line with where it’d be useful in your day-to-day life.

* Masters programs are just too darned long!  Multiple hours in a single evening in a classroom session, learning something that may or may not stick well (see bullets 1 and 2, above), plus homework, to get the credentials.

* Masters programs have lots of classes that cover things that are “basics” that you may not get to use practically for years, if ever.  I think of accounting classes: the principles are useful, but pragmatically, I’m going to pay an expert in the field to do any serious accounting, rather than spend more hours than necessary on it and likely muck it up based on a change in GAAP or in the tax policy.  I think of compiler design: I’m never going to write a compiler, but somehow this kind of class shows up regularly in masters programs for computer science.

* The classes that are useful, you’re already doing!  If it’s really useful, you’ve likely already had a taste of it, but are forced to spend hours in class hearing lectures on things you’re already at least basically familiar with.  Sure, you’re likely to learn something in the class, particularly by the end of it, to broaden or deepen your understanding, but in the meantime you’re to spend quite a few hours in a chair.  (I think here of OO classes, or database design for comp sci programs, or classes on ethics/social responsibility, or leadership, or marketing for business.)

I’ve come to believe that these credentials do show a certain commitment to improvement and education on the part of the person who possesses them, but they may not show a respect for their own time.  (And if they don’t have a respect for their own time/life, I worry about their respect for anyone else’s time/life!)  I respect the personalmba site, questions asked/answered via LinkedIn, and generally asking questions/watching folks to see who’s succeeding, and just as importantly, what things you believe you shouldn’t copy.

I’ve been dreaming of starting my own company.  It’s happened before, and nary a business plan or a change in business card has yet come about, so it’s unfortunately unlikely to pass.  Any company I work for, I start to think how I’ll do things differently in my company.  MY company will be driven by values.  MY company will harness the best thoughts and energies of its employees (me included) to greater success than if we worked as individuals.  MY company will engage with the community, in ways beyond just giving checks.  MY company will be a ‘Small Giant’.

Right now MY company would need to replace MY salary, which is our family’s primary source of income.  That’s a pretty heady requirement for a startup, to reliably replace a certain salary and benefits package.  You have to have a fair amount of confidence in both the business opportunity, and your ability to execute on it, and be more certain that you’re right than that the statistics on small businesses will fall against you.  Hence my reluctance to actually engage.  But that doesn’t stop me from thinking.  Thinking about who’d be the right people to bring on board.  Thinking about, what would attract that combination of people.  Thinking about what magic we could accomplish.

For all of the faults any of the companies I’ve ever been at have had, they have had the distinct advantage of actually having pulled the trigger and acted on that startup dream.  I keep reminding myself of that.

“So how dumb are we? Well, if we don’t vote some people who actually respect women into Congress soon, we just may be as dumb as those senators think.”

— my quote of choice from Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick in her article “How Dumb Are We?How long will women shoulder the blame for the pay gap?”, on the topic of Congress’s rejection of a bill that would have recognized each subsequent inequitable paycheck as an act of discrimination, rather than just the first one.

I guess the argument is that, although folks realize that womens’ salaries are artificially low because they are women, not remedying the situation is OK, since they didn’t instigate the initial discrimination. The discrepancy after that point can be argued as that individual receiving equitable percentage increases, but just not starting from as large a base. First job seekers, take note: your initial salary anywhere, but particularly for that first job, is one of the primary determiners of your salary trajectory for the remainder of your career. Take your second job as the job you really love; take your first job to set your salary benchmark, and make sure you negotiate for every additional penny you can get. That advice holds for everyone, but for women in particular. Make sure that you can justify any discrepancy LATER as years spent out of the workforce raising children, or sweatshop environments avoided. Just don’t let yourself be pigeon-holed as the woman who’ll cost you less just because she’s a woman and doesn’t know any better.

Every once in a while I like to take a look at the headers of the spam accruing in Google’s Spam folder for me.  There’s the usual assortment of titles indicating that, were I male, certain areas of my anatomy could be enlarged for the benefit of the ladies.  There are also offers, usually made in ALL CAPS, to help someone down on their luck by acting as a money agent to allow them to transfer funds from some foreign company.  Sometimes there are job offers, promising to let me work from home.  Nearly always, there are some number of medicinal offerings, beyond the ones promising enlargement of male organs.  Once in a while, someone tries to convince me that a certain stock is certain to go through the roof and I just need to get in on the ground floor.

These are all apparently items that folks have tested to some degree or other and believe will cause some percentage of folks to click through and either pick up the virus or spend some money or go to a website that will then let them pick up a virus.  Once in a while, though, someone shows some flair and comes up with a new angle.  I’m always interested in what the angle is, as much for its commentary on what’s thought to be attractive to the general population.

Turns out, the new thing is shoes.  There were 54 items in my Spam folder related to shoes, of the 813 Google Spam items has nicely sequestered away for me.  3 or 4 look to be from legitimate merchandisers with whom I’ve done business with before, though not as a shoe shopper.  The rest are honest to goodness spam.

Who buys enough shoes that this is the hot new spam?  I’ll send these messages your way.  They look to offer amazing deal, from Google’s preview of the message.  Gosh, I could get Gucci or Prada or high-end sandals for what I presume must be amazing prices.  Just let me know if you want these messages, and I’ll set up a Google filter to forward them your way.

P.S.  I’m highly amused that Google’s AdWords account expiration notification ended up sorted by them into their own Spam folder.