On my way to becoming what I want to be, something of a kickass man in full, I have discovered that it's more difficult for me to actually reign in my ambition. I have been telling people for the past five years that I am not anti-social, that I am anti-bullshit. But perhaps in fact I am anti-social in the way that is a necessity for people of substance who must actually walk the walk on a daily basis. For example, when I learned how to shoot pistols a few years ago, suddenly a huge portion of television and movie drama became unwatchable. I realized that I had been engaged in fanciful thinking about guns for the entire time that I never took the opportunity to stop being so ignorant and get some hands on experience. The more things one does of this nature, the more anti-social one is tempted to become as our society requires a certain discretion in the treatment of naifs. I approach all this with some caution, of course. As excited as I get to be the man on that wall, I can't always be so sure deep down in people's hearts that they want me on that wall. Naifs will deny that they need me on that wall. They think they can avoid the Morlocks simply by not driving through certain neighborhoods. Meh. Enough with the preface.
The last time I spent the winter in Philadelphia I was at the end of a particular career and I wrote the Way of the Servant. It detailed what i thought and still think should be the model of work done in my industry, that of business intelligence, and for that matter most of end-user computing and all programming that serves domain-specific human decision making. What you program into AIs is up to you, but is also for another discussion. To recap:
Ambition
- Newbie
- Apprentice
- Journeyman
- Hotshot
Mastery
- Guru
- Goto
Power
- Lord
- Demiurge
- Primary
Now if all of this sounds a bit feudal to you, you would be correct. I could go into it but here's the basic premise. Work is not democratic, and if it is to be meritocratic on a human scale (as opposed to a global scale) then hierarchies are inevitable. As much as I like decentralized power, I do not concede for a moment that children are equals to their parents or that wisdom does not accumulate with age. At some point Americans may choose to do away with the SAT and grade points and let everyone go to college for free, but for the time being be aware that very strict hierarchies are in place in our society that nobody finds particularly controversial.
Moreover there are certain tasks in human affairs that require command and control, because there are certain situations that arise that almost nobody wants to initiate. We must be persuaded, the majority of us, to engage in distasteful or dangerous work. For areas where we are unsure or ignorant or otherwise unmotivated we need the confidence that command gives. For such matters, stating the obvious, leadership is necessary.
Having become the Goto, and having fooled around being Guru once upon a time, I decided to become a Lord. That was in 2007. It didn't work out. There wasn't quite a cultural fit. I was a perfectionist, they were hustlers. I required clarity, they could wing it. I made promises my boss couldn't cash, and he expected me to figure out a way to get away with it. Uncomfortable, and ultimately unprofitable for the both of us. That seems so long ago I can't even remember, without the aid of an old resume, to tell you what happened next. But what I have been doing for the past 6 years has been another adventure altogether.
In that time, I went through an entirely new cycle of Apprenticeship and Journeyman's work in open source, cloud and devops work. Same trajectory, completely new toolset, and under the kind of direction I had never had in my entire career, a truly brilliant technical mind. But that cycle has come to a close and now I am ascending once again to work on a more Lordly level. Plus I've done a bit of Demiurgery. Now people hew to my rules. It's a new rhythm I'm beginning to get used to. I expect to wean myself, in due time, from all roles of ambition and mastery. I do have enough domain knowledge even though the world keeps spinning.
On the horizon are yet another set of interesting technologies associated with distributed non-trusted databases. Yes that old blockchain. I have decided that my angle will be simply that there are centralized fiat trusted databases and decentralized databases. The literature says that they can handle a righteously fast transaction volume. Nobody fully understands what the applications of all that will be. I hope to be able to swoop down from a 10,000 foot level and perch on a reasonably high position of command and control when all this matures. In the meantime, I will continue to be a data architect's best manager. Stay tuned.
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