Extended Period Of No Jobs

It's the last week of my holidays, so to set expectations straight away, this is going to be yet another stream of consciousness blog post. That means it will be shorter, unstructured and probably give way too much insight into my current mental state and the inner workings of my psyche.

You have been warned.

I almost wrote a full-fledged post about how creating a brand new platform for internal use is hard, but I'm going to save that until I'm contractually obligated to be somewhat professional again.

In other words, you'll probably see it next week.

Which brings me to the crux of this post; I don't really like working.

In fact, the moment I feel financially secure enough to just not work anymore, I am definitely going to exit from my current position as fast as I can. So fast that there will probably be a little cloud of smoke in the shape of my head that slowly clears to reveal that I am not there, classic cartoon style.

The interesting thing is that I'm not entirely sure why I don't really like working.

I know I don't like the overwhelming sense of obligation that comes with having a job. The feeling that you need to care about something that you probably don't care about, but someone is paying money for you to care, so you have to care about it. I find it tiresome.

I suspect that that is more a problem with how my brain works more than anything else, where I don't want to do a bad job or be seen as doing a bad job or to have not fulfilled my part of some sort of social contract.

Stupid brain.

It's not like I don't find satisfaction in what I do, because I do. I like basically all of the aspects of my current job, especially now that I don't have to spend a lot of time managing people directly, but even when I did have to do that, I still got satisfaction from doing it well.

Maybe it's something to do with passion?

I'm sure there are people out there who absolutely adore what they do, who get up every day, eyes bright with excitement about yet another opportunity to do the thing they love.

I don't think I've ever had that feeling.

At best, I tolerate what I do.

My very first job was writing software to help people interpret the complexities of the electricity market in Australia. I was fresh out of university and incredibly green, but I can honestly say that the subject matter didn't exactly light a spark in my soul. It was interesting and I can credit that job for my love of wrangling data, but that's about it.

One of my subsequent jobs was creating and maintaining software to support property managers in the real estate industry. Again, satisfaction in doing it well, but I didn't really care about the domain.

I thought things would be different at Atlassian, creating software for teams to do their best work, but the reality is that our products are so gargantuan, with hundreds of moving parts, that I only really understand a tiny bit of what is going on and my ability to influence good outcomes for our customers is limited. I don't hate the domain that I'm embedded in (service sharding), but I wouldn't say it was a calling either.

It's a job, just like all the others.

Holidays remind me that I'm pretty content just existing, but I do wonder how long that feeling would last, given that the holidays I take are only just long enough to surface from the day-to-day, take a long, deep, shuddering breath and then dive right back into the thick of things.

The longest I've ever gone between jobs is five weeks, which was the time between my last job and starting at Atlassian, and I had a very distinct goal to focus on during that time; find a new job.

In order to achieve that goal I set myself up with a solid pattern that mostly amounted to carving out the morning to research jobs, learn new things and attend interviews, while leaving the afternoon free to do whatever I wanted.

It felt pretty good, but in the grand scheme of things, it was really only a few weeks.

Maybe I just need to take an extended period of time off to test the hypothesis that I don't really like working. I might get to week six and realise that I have made a horrible mistake and need to find some sort of externally provided purpose immediately or risk spiralling into a deep well of depression.

Or maybe I'll make up my own goals, set my own direction, and become emotionally, intellectually and professionally fulfilled.

Regardless of the rambling above, I'm back to work next week and while I wouldn't say I'm looking forward to it, I am at least curious as to what has happened while I've been gone, how things have progressed and what sort of fires I will have to extinguish.

Plus, with three weeks holiday under my belt, I have a handy-dandy, freshly charged shield of detachment to help me get through it all.

That will have to be good enough for now.