Hello,
I've been away due to good old Xmas - and yes it was awesome. I've even had some great promotions of this blog at the dinner table. Anywho, I wanted to talk about the curse again. I feel it big time now - I'm currently dissatisfied with my job. I work at a big faceless corporation in a little cube. I make decent money, but you can always use more. I'm at a point where I should really know what I want to get into, but I still have no idea.
I routinely contemplate this while riding the T. I always ask myself what I would be good at, but I keep running into the problem of thinking I'd be good at a lot of things - and it seems that what I really want is change.
On one hand, I'd like to pursue Client Relationship Management - because I like to talk... at length. And I've had experience with many different areas within the asset management operations field. On the other hand, I think I'd like to try to work on programming because I think there is tremendous opportunity in the derivatives operations software industry. But am I just convincing myself of these opportunities because I don't like what I am doing now? Will I feel this same way in 6 months at a different job. Will something else perk my interest and I'll want to do that?
What will be interesting is a crap shoot to the dilettante, but there will always be something else. Always another thing to make a hobby/pursuit...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Take a page our of "Stumbling on Happiness", Hornet. Ask someone who is doing that job today. For example, I know a derivatives programmer - who is trying to get out and move to trading... I'm sure you know CRM folks too. Talk to them. See what they say.
Listen to the 'lac. Also, you probably don't want to be a developer monkey, BUT if you're thinking more on the tech side of financial services, I think your engineer's mind combined with your tech savvy and general dilettantarity could make you fit to manage a software project at the functional/requirements level. Everyone's outsourcing their custom development these days, usually to a software project manager in China or India who in turn manages the actual developers writing the code. The key person in this food chain is the in-house project manager, who doesn't necessarily know how to write code, but can understand technical systems, has a rough idea of how the software development cycle works, and (most importantly) understands the end-goal of the project and the underlying business requirements. (Typically, the outsourced project manager will pretend to understand these things, but in my experience they don't that often.) When the outsourced dev team invariably gets a lot of the project wrong the first time, the in-house project manager has to analyze the functional disconnect and offer high-level guidance on how to bridge the gap in the time remaining before the deadline... so it really does take someone who can understand both the tech side and the business side of the project, which is a rare ability among the older folk (and therefore something in demand these days), but one that people like us naturally have. Anyway, food for thought.
Post a Comment