The aforementioned cusp has come and gone. I’m taking the UCD job.

The more I spoke with the UCD manager, the UCD senior technical lead, and some of my potentially-future teammates in that department, the more I began to get excited, and to buy into the idea that this could be a really good fit. I can, if my readers will forgive me a lapse into what I hope is not perceived as unbridled ego, a lapse which I promise is due only to the necessity of forming a properly considered opinion and one which I will endeavour to keep as brief as reasonably possible, be sort of a smart guy at times, and this job is basically about being paid to think, and to think bigger than individual developers or even individual products get to think. It’s about making things not suck, and about cutting through complex and overcomplicated things to deliver an idea which is comprehensible and intuitive. Maybe I will find it doesn’t fit, and in 6 months I’ll be calling the security guy back — security is still something I follow pretty closely after all, there was never a question that I found both jobs interesting. But for right now, the UCD job is totally the right call.

Everything is clearer on a cusp.

Of course, now comes the process — it would certainly have been less headache to have just quit. As an internal transfer, my old department and manager get a say in whether, or at least when I can make a move like that. This process has always seemed a little broken to me, however well-intentioned. Basically, when an employee at IBM wants to move, they request an “availability date” from their manager: an agreed-upon date after which the employee is free to move. This is done so that managers are able to exert a modicum of restraint on disruptive transfers, to wit, “We are 3 weeks from the end of this product cycle, so it will hurt us much less for you to leave then, instead of now. You are therefore available Mid-August.” And in the case of most employees this is, I believe, how it basically works. However to the extent that you are a high producer or otherwise valuable, it seems that the incentives surrounding corporate culture in general, and management in particular, will motivate your manager to resist, to keep you working for them by giving you a date that is unrealistically far out. Thus those who arguably should be moving the most for the good of the company, people who can land in a department, make a difference, and then move on, are those most discouraged from doing so. I don’t know yet what my date will be, though I have requested one — we’ll see if this means pain or not.

I work for IBM. Most people who would read this already know that, but in case it comes as news to you, there it is. I work for IBM and I am generally content with the work I do there and the environment that is cultivated. Generally. Content.

So it came as something of a surprise when, out of nowhere, not 1 but 2 jobs, of vastly different character and substance arrived in my lap within 12 hours of one another. Before proceeding, I should point out that in the metaphorical seascape, where these jobs are submarines or possibly whales, and where my current management is perhaps some kind of surface vessel, a fishing trawler, say, or a canoe; in the sense of all of this, it would not be incorrect to say that said trawler is not equipped with a sidescan sonar buoy, if you catch my drift. That is to say, they don’t know about this, and frankly I would be just as happy if you, dear reader, did not inform them. Surely google will find this blog eventually but by then I think this situation will have resolved itself.

Job the first concerns a security course I took a while ago, one of much ethical hacking and a generous soupçon of advanced penetration testing besides. It was a fun course, if somewhat a rehashing for me of things I had already learned, and the week after taking it, in talking with the instructor, he told me he had a teaching/pentesting position for me in the fall if I were interested. I have met with him. We have had drinks. His motorcycle’s vanity plate is, I swear, HAX0R. Delicious. This job would have me doing something I like, and getting paid almost heinously well on a per-diem basis, but it would be a contracted position and would not be full time and it’s quite unclear whether the degree to which it is part time is made up for by the aforementioned heinousness.

Job the second concerns the recent departure from IBM of a friend of mine and delightful fellow named Mike. Mike was in the User Centered Design lab, which is to say that, like the BASF commercials of yore, his job was not to make things, it was to make things better. UCD are the people that grab developers by the scruff of their earlobes and shake them like British nannies until they produce something usable, to wit: “You can’t put the close button on the other side of the window just because you think it’s cool! You can’t invent this stuff as you go along. The user, she can’t take much more’o’this!” It turns out the question of how to make extremely complex things usable and comprehensible to extremely simple users is an interesting and challenging one. And not just to Mike; I too find it delicious. His job, it seems, has also become available to me, if I should be so inclined (or a derivative of his job, no one can replace Mike, he is a beautiful and unique snowflake, yadda yadda yadda). I have met with his manager. I do not know whether he has a cool license plate.

I have been forestalling the decision until a Cusp, which seems now to be, if not upon me, then at least afoot. The UCD gig will be available first. If I decide to pass on it for the security gig, I give up a sure thing for a maybe. On the other hand I know I will enjoy the security job, and I merely strongly suspect I will enjoy the nebulousness that is the UCD job. On the other hand, I have a degree in cogsci, I love humanity, and UCD is about people, and making things not suck, which are things about which I have passion. On the other hand, there are license plates to consider.

It comes to this: the thing I will not do is take the UCD job, get the offer for the security job, and jump ship two months in. I don’t care that I owe IBM no particular debt. I don’t care that IBM would dump me in a second if it increased shareholder value. I have a professional ethic which prevents me from the duplicity of taking a job I know I won’t keep, so if I take the UCD job, I will be saying ‘no’ to the security one, or at very least “call me in 6 months and we’ll see how well UCD is fitting.” The security job may or may not wait, though I suspect it will — good teachers with technical backgrounds are a scarcity, even before considering the obscurity of the material. UCD definitely won’t wait — they need someone and if it isn’t me, it will be someone else. But I’ve been given to believe it certainly could be me.

It remains undecided.

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