# I'm looking for a job. Part 2, Humans are hard and individuality
This is an old post and the contents may or may not be correct anymore and links may or may not be safe.
My previous post (I’m looking for a job. Why?) has done very well to bring some of my peers directly to my door to ask me questions. Some of these questions are really hard to answer and some of the feedback on the post was quite antithetical to the message I intended to convey so here we are with a part 2 to help dispel some of the lore of part 1.
Me, myself and my career
My entire career is built on an undocumented feature of myself, that is my natural instinct to drop what I’m doing and jump into action helping others and then immediately context switch back to what I was doing. I like this feature and it’s not one I would ever like to change about myself, it works for me at a personal level and at a professional level and I feel it is in large the reason my friends and I have such close friendships. We are creatures that like to follow pattern/example and I like to try my hardest to set the best possible example (it doesn’t always go that way, I’m an idiot too sometimes) for those around me.
I tend to do this by:
- Asking the right questions
- Admitting when I don’t know enough about something (but then I obsess over it and go learn about it)
- Offer and help others to build a platform to learn and improve professionally and emotionally as both affect how we work and work as a whole.
- Show humility (sometimes this is plain shamelessness, it’s hard to distinguish sometimes)
The above (which is not exclusive) has helped me go from a business started in a library when I was homeless in my teens) to this very day, a 30 year old white dude whining about being tired, the irony is not lost on me.
I’ve always tried to use my platform to help others, stopping when needed, picking up entirely new tools to help someone learn about themselves and probing my very meaning to try to offer my soul to others to help them build their own platform. My emotional competence isn’t famous but my ability to empathise is known well in my circles and my ability to “feel” and experience the problem of another gives me all the ammunition I need to develop other people into better versions of themselves.
My entire purpose is to help other people, the fact I choose to do this with technology simply offers me a way to charge for my very personality. I am not defined by my work and my company does not define me. The same as any company that I would enjoy working with.
What defines me if my job doesn’t?
We all have our individuality, we think in different ways, we have different biases; conscious or not, that affect how we problem solve and whom we want to spend time with and above all else, how we treat and view others. I always wanted to start a company that invested emotionally in it’s staff in the same way it invests emotionally in it’s client’s needs.
My tiredness of running a company might come from the novelty being lost in running a business. It could be my desire to spend time with more/different people on a daily basis, it might even be my lack of skill to physically grow as a business and it could be the utter relentlessness of our government making small businesses harder to run.
This does not make me anti-corporation or anti-business but rather I want to work with people capable of identifying similar issues internally and task someone with the right personal skill set to try and remedy the situation. The list of types of companies “I won’t work with” is simply my summation of experience I have with companies of that type where I believe the people actually define your business, not just the work, the number in the bank or your clients.
I do what I can to make people feel better about themselves, their situations and their days in general and I don’t agree with making products that are designed to fail or designed to make people unwell or kill people. I don’t agree with products that are addictive to the point it destroys lives or damages people and I don’t like companies that make no real effort to address these problems because it affects their bottom line and share prices and I don’t agree with union busting- unions are a safety net for the people who feel vulnerable and without them companies would escape punitive measure for mistreatment of staff. You tell me who learns from any of the above, or is it all for profit?
I am of course not just human minded but I think at a commercially viability level too. A job is still a job. You can be the nicest person in the world but if you don’t add value to a business you’re costing which is simply unviable and needs rethinking/repositioning. In the 5 years I’ve been running New World Code, I’ve had some very good years and of course some years where I’m a little on the shy side- it’s a learning exercise, as everything is and it’s my job to help those around me- especially the ones paying me, to achieve their goals and dreams with the tools I have.
When did people become less important than profit?
Some of these opinions and traits of mine can be construed as a bit on the extreme side, I will not apologise for always putting living things before a number on a screen somewhere. This is who I am, inside and out and I am looking for that special company (they do exist) that checks all those boxes or is keen to improve on the above.
My perfect role
During my time running New World Code the times I enjoyed most were the times I was in the thick of a client’s workplace, identifying issues at personal levels and business levels and doing the appropriate risk assessment of continuing on the current path or to invest in a software solution to help resolve the issues facing the staff and C level and scoping this work, savings to the company and giving those people a chance to be happier at their place of work.
I am also happiest when I’m mentoring teams in new, commercially driven practices such as better time keeping, estimation, push-back and task focus. Mentoring team members 1 to 1 in better problem solving and helping them develop their skills at a personal level.
Of course, I’m a developer and I live and breathe code that solves problems and you can read about what I do in Part 1 and on my Work History page.
My timeframe
It’s business as usual at New World Code, I’m lucky enough to have enough business to keep going well into the future which affords me the chance to choose the right company, I will consider sensible offers of absorption for immediate effect otherwise I will maintain the professional attitude and do whats right for everyone in terms of notice and rehiring to fill a gap.