CJ

Yes, I have a bunch of New Year’s resolutions – unlike many, which are nearly impossible to act on, these 10 things I started doing in late 2011; the results began to pay off. I decided that since I’m already doing many of them, I could improve in the new year:

1. Life Balance – I won’t work 10+ hours a day while neglecting to spend time with myself or with friends. I’m going to work smarter as opposed to harder - I won’t burn out again. 
2. Eliminating Sources Of Drama- 2011 was the year for drama: much of it induced by people who I thought were my friends. I’ve started on a path of self-evaluation and begun to eliminate those people from my life. It’s a sad process to go through but I believe that it will pay dividends in the long term. The gossipers, backstabbers and manipulators have to go.
3. Not Conforming to Others’ Definition of “Normal”- Because I have a pretty unique personality (to put it lightly), many people try to make me conform to their definition of social “norms”. Sorry, I hate to put it this way: but go take a walk off a short pier. My uniqueness is embraced by those who really appreciate me for who I am. I’m sick of people telling me what I should or should not do in all aspects of my life when they have not even experienced a fraction of what I have experienced firsthand. While offering advice and opinion is fine when the person asks for it, trying to impose your standards of “normal” on people is very shortsighted and selfish. I’m not changing my personality, my party style or my way of doing things. Get over it.
4. Putting Myself First- I’m going to say “NO” more often if I cannot do it, or find time to do things for others. For far too long, I said “yes” to everything that was demanded of me, and people took advantage of that – and it caused all kinds of problems. In the coming year, I’ll only say yes to things that fit into the balanced framework of my life. Self-Centered? No. But being able to say yes to things and give them 100% attention adds value to all involved. You can’t give 100% to every single effort if 100 people are asking you to devote 100% to their request. It’s humanly impossible.
5. Pursuing MY Career Interests First- I don’t want to go into programming. So I won’t. While there will be some programming involved I’m sure, that is not my goal/aspiration in life. I don’t want to be something that I am burned out on and find to be very boring. If I have to find a firm that respects that in the coming year(s), then so be it. To tie in #4, I need to do what is going to make me happy. It’s the only way I would look forward to going into work not stressed out, angry and always at the edge of snapping. I work best when I am working towards something that fulfills my desires and aspirations.
6. Go Somewhere New- I want to leave the US in 2012 for a week, to explore a place I’ve never been to before. I have my sights set on visiting Lebanon if the geopolitical climate allows. I’d like to check out the Middle East (specifically Dubai, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia).
7. Replace “Social Media” with Real Humans- Twitter and Facebook are not substitutes for real human contact. Too many people spend about as much time on these networks as they do working. For some people, their only interaction with people seems to be on those networks. I’ve started limiting the time that I spend on both these networks and will continue to do more of that in the coming year. Besides, there seems that there’s just way too much drama and negativity that I have to wade through and filter out. That time is best spent elsewhere. For example, the last few weeks of 2011, I think I logged into Facebook maybe 3 times – I apparently still haven’t missed anything earth shattering. One of those times was to respond to a friend who wanted my contact info so that we could meet up in person in Chicago prior to New Years. Twitter is a different story, but I’ve gone from checking my phone at least 100 times a day to picking up my phone to check these things at designated times. Improvement.
8. Define 3 Goals and Work The Plan- I’m horrible at planning and executing. Part of it stems from overextending myself (see #4) and part of it from burnout. This is the year where I will define 3 major goals (Career, Self and Financial) and achieve them with concrete steps. With all the newfound time I have on my hands with the implementation of #4 and achieving a better work/life balance, I can devote more time to actually completing the steps and measuring my progress along the way.
9. Party More, Stress Less- I’m not going to worry about what people think or say in 2012. I’m going to party/laugh/play more this year – I deserve it (and not in one of those entitled ways either). I spent the past 3 years stressing myself out to near death (literally, I almost starved myself to death/tried to prematurely end up six feet under) that it’s time that I reverse it. I’ll find the right proportion and balance, but that is going to be my decision alone to make.
10. Lose Weight- HA! Gotcha! Kidding. I am maintaining my ideal weight, pre-2008 levels now. Looking good and feeling great now. My current weight is definitely better than looking like an emaciated cow.

Happy 2012.

For years now, I’ve been using Linux exclusively on every device here – my laptop/tablet, desktops and servers. My workstation at work runs Linux Mint with a Windows XP VM inside (as long as Excel is the predominant tool in Finance and Bloomberg/Reuters is a Windows only product, this may be the norm), as well as both of my workstations at home. But, recently, I installed Windows 7 on my tablet and second desktop – and I am impressed.

(Collective gasp from all of my friends who have long known me as a Linux geek)

When I installed Linux Mint 10 on this tablet, I spent 2 weeks getting everything working properly. Hotkeys, On Screen Display and the fingerprint reader. I spent hours upon hours Googling and finding a hodgepodge of solutions – one of which required some Perl scripting. It was hell. Nevermind bothering to upgrade the OS, many of the packages (especially for screen rotation) simply disappeared or were incompatible.

I don’t want to spend hours coding anymore. As a matter of fact, I would be perfectly happy if I never wrote another software program outside of my R statistics coding ever again (More on my coding/technology burnout in a later installment). I wanted something that Just Works and Windows 7, much to my surprise did just that. Surely, there were a couple of driver files I had to download directly from Lenovo (updated wireless drivers, fingerprint reader, On Screen Display) but I was pleasantly surprised when I booted up Windows 7 on this tablet that things just worked. No tinkering, no hunting down obscure scripts. In less than 48 hours I had everything if not more up and running, including my beloved R stuff, my custom two way sync solution with my home server (still running Linux).

Same thing for my secondary desktop: it was a nightmare figuring out how to get 2 dual head ATI cards to display all 4 screens correctly – Again, I spent hours googling and tinkering with Xorg configuration scripts just to cobble together something that at least allowed me to use all 4 monitors. Windows 7 install eliminated all of that. The drivers just worked. My W7 install on my secondary machine was up and running with everything I needed and more in less than 4 hours. Not to mention that I was now able to take advantage of RemoteApps functionality (much like X tunneling in Linux).

I admit, Linux has its place here at CBK Labs. I replaced the graphics card in my other workstation with a quad head Nvidia one and used the proprietary Nvidia drivers/settings to setup all 4 displays in under 5 minutes. That workstation still runs some of my more advanced R stats number crunching (taking advantage of MPI and clustering capabilities that haven’t been fully ported to Windows yet). There’s always going to be a place for headless Linux servers here as well – my file server runs Samba and other services (custom trading infrastructure such as ActiveMQ, etc.)… But for my desktop, I have become impressed and made a believer in Windows 7. I don’t want to tinker with scripts and packages for weeks on end – I just want it to work.

I had an interesting short discussion today where I was asked if I support the Obama administration’s attempt to solve the Unemployment Discrimination problem by allowing people to sue firms that did not hire them based on their current employment status. I replied:

No, I opined in June that you can’t legislate this issue away without unintended consequences. But there needs to be an effort to highlight the idiocy of not hiring someone because they aren’t currently working. When my bank failed, it was through no fault of my own, yet I found that because I was not a ‘passive’ candidate, I was undesirable.

Now this is where I feel that I need to elaborate a bit more (and thus the reason for this post) - Millions of people were laid off through no fault of their own beginning in 2007 and continuing to this day. What makes it more sickening is that instead of a singular focus on getting people back to work, both sides have done more damage than good. With the Republicans digging in their heels and basically stomping on the throats of the unemployed and the Democrats attempting to spend our way to prosperity (isn’t this ironic that excess spending in 2001-2006 got us in this mess) via a $787bn bank bailout (with the hope that the banks would turn around and inject that money back into the system through loans to businesses, etc.) — we have exacerbated the problem.

Now, it’s pretty ironic that the same Republicans who abhor the notion of “transfer payments” and Medicare/Medicaid are the very same people who, when they get chewed up and spit out by the corporate machine, will be first to line up to receive those benefits. What’s even more ironic is that the same party that says that because they are unemployed; they are lazy, worthless, poor slobs. 

Count yourself lucky if you haven’t had to endure the pain of being laid off in this recession. Don’t look down your nose at those people who were. I was one of those people, and I experienced unemployment discrimination firsthand. It’s not fun given that people who really know me know that I am extremely capable and competent in my industry. What has become of American society that we feel the need to stomp on people’s throats at their misfortune?

In order to give you some context of my point of view, I present these articles that I wrote throughout 2011 on this topic at SSA:

Employment, Prejudice, Deferred Productivity and Insanity

http://blog.stonestreetadvisors.com/2011/07/26/employment-prejudice-deferred-productivity-and-insanity/

Boots On Throats, The Long, Hot Summer

http://blog.stonestreetadvisors.com/2011/06/22/boots-on-throats-the-long-hot-summer/

May Job Numbers, Structural Or Structurally Selective

http://blog.stonestreetadvisors.com/2011/06/03/may-job-numbers-structural-or-structurally-selective/

This past week was rather interesting, my email inbox saw a surge in emails from recruiters who are all of a sudden interested in working with me again (a lot of them heard that I had moved to a new company in the past month). Gone were the typical mail merge form letters, they were replaced with what seems like an actual human taking 2 minutes out of their day to engage someone.

What really changed? Why, all of a sudden after being largely ignored for the greater part of this year am I now someone that they want to “reconnect with” to see “what my career goals are”?

I’ve written many times on the idiocy and insanity of what has become the job hunt in post-2008 America. The amount of misconceptions about “Active” vs. “Passive” candidates in the employment pool boggles my mind; especially given that we’re in the worst labor market this nation has seen in over 70 years. Instead of focusing on trying to cast a broad net to get candidates who are talented but have not been able to get past the Taleo, keyword/buzzword filters, or the myriad of BS “assessments” that are commonplace now, people are trying to actively marginalize nearly 22 million Americans[1].

What has changed? Why are these people so eager and tripping over themselves to “take me out to lunch” or “meet for coffee” now, as opposed to 3 months ago? The only difference is that I’m now an “Active” candidate (whatever that’s supposed to infer). Nothing else has changed.

The common misconception that recruiters and “job creators” have is that once you become an Active candidate, you’re Grade A. You have no mental issues, you’re a top performer, you’re keen on opportunities that will maximize your profits (or give your competition some sort of perceived edge by hiring you). But, as someone who went through being actively courted by these same people, then summarily dismissed/marginalized by them and now back to actively courted - I have asked all of them one simple question: What changed between 3 months ago and today?

My mental (and physical) scars are still here. The mental scars are still raw. While I go to my new firm every day and do some pretty kick butt things, I have to work 5x as harder than the next person to overcome the mental state that built up during this crisis: Anxiety, deep depression, a substantial loss of self-esteem/self-worth and trying to get over the huge amount of rejection that I faced. My skills have NOT deteriorated, else I would’ve not been selected for the role that I am in today. I have that going for me that the only learning curve I have is learning how the new firm does business and their terminology.

The recruiters still haven’t bothered to answer that simple question. Perhaps they don’t know, but what I know is that I am moving onwards and there’s a long road ahead to becoming at least 70% of the previous me. I will never be the same again, many things were irreparably damaged. I’ll never be able to get back to 100% of the old me, but at least I’ve turned the trajectory around. It’s time to regroup what I do have and focus on the future.

They want us to die.

Take our livelihoods,

rip our families apart,

ostracize us from “them.

They took our dignity, stomped and spat on it.

We are nothings now, nobody. They want us to die. We are nonexistent.

Therefore, I will die. They won. 2008.