Posts filed under 'BizExecToBe'
Hearing lots about the mega million jackpot today. $640 million would certainly make an impact in most folks’ bank accounts. Apparently, $640 mil is more than what most US households would earn in 10,000 years.
Your odds of winning are long. Ridiculously long. 2 hole in ones in a single golf game long. You’re more likely to be crushed to death by a vending machine or dying by being a lefty who uses right-hand products, according to the Daily Beast. But boy, wouldn’t it be nice to live like a mega millionaire?
Um, no. Not thinking so. Maybe a mini millionaire. Someone who has enough money in the bank to not worry about whether they’re covering the bills, not feeling like they’re stuck in their job, able to dream a bit and feel like they could make those dreams (travel, motorcycle, adventures, …) come true.
Mini-millionaire is easy, and a lot less dependent on 1 in 176 million odds. Live below your means. If you make 100K, live on 85-90K or less. If you make 60K, live on 45-50K, or less. Act like you’re still making the money you started your career with – no cost of living increases, no raises or promotions. What’s that do for you? It does a few things. One, you’re not stuck in what I’ve heard termed as ‘golden handcuffs’. Golden handcuffs are jobs that you have to keep because they’re the only ones that will give you the kind of salary you need to live on. You’ll keep going to a place that you don’t like, doesn’t inspire you, or otherwise give you any reason to keep going to work other than that particular paycheck number. It’s a gilded cage. It’s a demotivating cage. You’re not going to do your best work if the reason you’re still there is only pocketbook motivated. For one thing, there’s always the distraction of looking for the cage upgrade. Ones’ monetary ‘needs’ have a funny habit of growing, unless specifically kept in check, so soon enough that cage starts feeling just a bit snug.
Second, it gives you a ‘go-to-he**’ fund. It gives you money in the bank which you can use as a cushion to find a different job at any point. A guy I knew at a job a few years ago didn’t particularly like his job, but was paid at the top of the market. He ended up laid off, as top of the line salaries make you top of the line targets. The top of the line salary part wasn’t a bad thing, but his need to get a job very quickly gave him a large salary-sized problem. Contrast that with having the freedom to say: I don’t like this job. I don’t like working for you. I’m not going to do it anymore. It’s a wonderful and yes, powerful feeling, to know that you’re working for someone because you want to, not because you specifically need to. Now, there’s a difference between need to work generally, meaning at some point you need to get another job, versus never wanting to work again. Somewhat theoretical for me – having a hard time imagining myself not working at all at some point in the future, even if that work is part-time or volunteering or … My point is, since entering the workforce out of college, it’s been a goal of mine to never work somewhere just because they’re willing to pay me, even if they pay me well. And a ‘go to he**’ fund is a great tool to help that happen.
Lastly, and on the much more personally rewarding side, one of the things that millionaires often do is give lots of money away to causes they find inspiring. Warren Buffett has Girls, Inc, Bill Gates has the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Carnegie had Carnegie Hall, Carnegie Mellon, etc, etc… They write checks to help make things happen. When you live below your means, giving away money no longer is making a choice between helping yourself and helping someone else. There’s a lot more latitude there to give more freely. It hasn’t really cost you anything. Now, one can make the argument that it costs you the things that you’re otherwise not doing in your lifestyle with that excess (my term) money. Still, though, it costs you something you’re not doing, not something you are – very different dynamic.
Reading the paper this morning, someone in Maryland won one of the Mega Million lottery tickets. It’s not me, I’m certain, as I didn’t buy a ticket. Whoever won has a lot more means this morning than they did last night. It should be a bit easier to live within it. That said, there’re many lottery winners who don’t live within their means and go bankrupt, even at the tune of income of the level of millionaires. Contrast that with folks who build their habit of living within their means and become ‘The Millionaire Next Door’. Or, better, the guy who lives like a millionaire because he’s not beholden to his job and gets to give away his money to the causes that he finds near and dear. Bank account balance may or may not make him a millionaire, but he sure feels like one.
March 31st, 2012
“Everyone” thinks open-source is good. Software that’s free to you; software whose code is available for you to learn from, extend, or modify; software that’s presumably updated periodically by a hoard of magic elf volunteers for the sake of their own technical intellectual gratification.
Now.. are you one of those folks who contributes to an open-source project? Hmmm – very different angle.
Now… are you one of those folks who figures out how to run an open-source project, bringing together the disparate interests of that presumed hoard of volunteers into one uber well-running machine?
Wow. I used to think that the hardest job in the world to do well would be to set up a high performing team at a fast food restaurant. Staff turn-over, low pay, and the like. I’m beginning to reconsider: the most interesting leadership and management challenges seem to be in the open-source space, particularly for projects that have a significant user base and vested interests from many parties interested in driving direction. Lots of smart people, lots of competing interests, lots of feeling of a need to get somewhere in particular, lots of directions in particular.
Neat things to think about…
March 10th, 2012
Watching for news of OSCON again this year. Proposal submitted, waiting for word. The topic I proposed a year or so ago on W3C and OpenAjax Hub seems to have prepared me well for topics ongoing at work nowadays. May this year’s proposal topic serve me as well, AND get me a ticket to Portland. Hoping to score the trifecta: a trip to the open-source software convention, an opportunity as a girl geek to speak, and an opportunity to highlight my / my company’s role in something pretty cool. Hoping!
March 5th, 2012
It’s a sad day when I get more interest / $$s from my credit card rewards program than I do for saving diligently.
March 5th, 2012
Lots of proposal writing of various forms going on lately. Wrote an SBIR, which we’ll hear about in a few weeks. Advised on another. Wrote an OSCON abstract, per my norm. (Hey, one way to get more women presenting is to be one of those women who presents!) Have notes for a mobile application that I’d like to write to (1) knock some socks off at work for folks who thing I’m “only” managerial, (2) demonstrate some neat technologies that may help us in various ways, and (3) build something that’ll help make next year’s charity auction a bit simpler. While I’m doing everything else with that app, I’ll use it to make me a bit smarter on Git and push forward some ideas on building a geek community.
But all of those are just ideas on paper. They’re informed ideas, to be sure, based on reading up in various areas to make sure I’m not painting us into any corners. But they’re not working code. Need more working code. I think the challenge is to just, well, start! It’s so easy to scribble ideas, to build up that portfolio of useful things to work upon and pick from. But eventually, I’ve gotta kick my tail into gear with action, and focus in on a particular area to get some specific bit of success.
Tomorrow’s goal for the evening: download jQuery Mobile 1.0, build one screen for my auction app, and commit that screen to Git. That’s it – nothing more noble. But it gets a dev environment and two bits of visible outcome (screen + code in repository). It’s something, and something to build upon.
If it weren’t 1:00 in the morning, that would be the set for today. But time to stop procrastinating sleep…
January 16th, 2012
Our college ministry group is working through a New Testament in a year Bible study. It’s supposed to be 5 minutes a day, 5 days a week. Never seems to be quite that short to me, but, as in any time where I’ve kept pace with studies to help prepare for Sunday school or some such, I’m getting an amazing exposure through it to things I hadn’t considered or learned before.
I’m behind: I should be in John, but I’m working through 1Peter tonight. 1Peter has that passage about wives being submissive to your husbands. It’s not the one in Ephesians (5:22) that folks think of. But I was surprised to run into the same language.
That’s not what sent me to this post, though. I was more intrigued by the work connections I was seeing this evening. Any of the contexts of elders, of slaves, of masters, of governors… all of that advice to folks in those roles suddenly seemed pertinent to me. Sensitive to the idea that I might offend someone in a work context here (no reason folks would find this, but no reason to assume they couldn’t), I’ll refrain from details. I’ve just begun to realize that where the Bible calls out roles and gives advice, often that advice applies more broadly. I end up asking myself: is that insight only applicable to men? To old men? To old women? (etc, etc). Sometimes it seems it may be. But the context of ‘slaves, submit yourselves to your master with all respect’ seems applicable. The context of ‘a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight’ might not apply just to women. Of leading/shepherding ‘not because you must, but because you are willing, as God wants you to be; not greedy for money, but eager to serve; not lording it over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock’ sure would seem to fit a broader swath of folks than just those ordained as elders.
For those who trip across this who’re interested in the Bible study, it’s here, at least as of now: http://www.navpress.com/uploadedFiles/5x5x5_BRP.pdf
October 17th, 2011
A few folks from my company are working on putting together a ‘Young Women in Computing Day’ next month. Women are generally under-represented in the software field, particularly in the software development field. I’ll avoid stats here, but will just say that at my last job they sent out an email to the guys in the office saying that they could no longer use the womens’ rest room since there was now a girl on staff. In my career, I’ve seen women in the requirements analysts role, women in the tester roles, women in the project leadership roles, but it’s been very rare to find women in the pure development roles. So very happy to have opportunities to expose girls to fields that are harder to expose them to then the teacher that they see in school every day or the doctor who helps them get better when they’re not feeling good. Those roles are needed – but already have plenty of men and women heading their way. Want to have a way to more concretely expose them to the fun they can have and the good they can do in software development – and hey, the money in the field’s not bad, either.
The Wall Street Journal recently had a section, Women in the Economy, which was the result of a conference bringing business and government leaders together to talk about what’s holding women back in the workplace. One of the phrases that jumped out at me was the statement that women are promoted based on performance, men are promoted based on potential. It occurs to me that part of that may be that by helping young ladies recognize their own potential in the field early, we can help escalate them up both the potential and the performance curve. What’s more appealing to a recruiter looking to fill their slots with young talent than someone who’s been excited about technology and doing things with it for years beyond their peers?
Hoping someday to look around a technical company or a technical conference and see a better mix of men and women. Think it’s part of my responsibility to advocate and work to help make it happen.
April 15th, 2011
This past week, I was part of an interview caucus at work. In these, all of the folks who interviewed a given candidate get together to make a decision as to whether to make an offer to a candidate. Each candidate at our company is typically interviewed by 5 or more people, including a mix of technical staff and executive staff. Makes for a long stint for the candidate, but at the end of it, we’ve gotten a good sense of them and they’ve gotten a good sense of us.
Our “victim” this week was a solid contributor at his previous company who was recommended by some of our current team who’d worked with him previously. I had some concerns, though – through no fault of his, his current company wasn’t really doing anything that we’d consider particularly relevant, from a technology perspective. He’d actually argued for using more current technologies, and had eventually decided to leave based at least partially on this problem. All good, so far. The challenge was that he couldn’t tell me how he was scratching his “geek itch” outside of work, since work wasn’t doing it for him. Reading blogs? Doing some coding on the side? Couldn’t even get him to give me a list of the things he _wished_ he was doing. No extra effort to get more current, other than to raise a concern with his company that he wasn’t staying current.
All of this boils down to me to a “watch what I do, not what I say I wanna do” sort of lesson. He says he wants to be more current, but isn’t doing anything about it. I called out that attribute in the caucus. And now I’m feeling accountable to myself to a bit more. Working on an OSCON brief right now, so surveying my topic and making sure all of my points look like they’ll hang together technically. Plan to poke a few components of my brief and really push ‘em to their bounds, whether or not my topic is accepted. [Desperately hoping it's accepted... need to push myself technically, and show a few more women up there, all in one fell swoop.] Looking to build these geek opportunities into my regular work-life, as well, since I’ve become more of a team enabler and leader than technical contributor over the past year.
Oh, by the way, see what I do not just what I say is spilling over into the rest of my thinking, too… called someone else on it in the work world, but I see it hitting my Christian walk, my fitness approach, my interaction with my kids and my hubby, …. starting to feel like I need to be careful when I open my mouth!
February 6th, 2011
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.
February 10th, 2010
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.
August 19th, 2009
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