Technicat

Topic

Career

A collection of 20 issues

Rethinking Narcissism

We’ve all had selfish colleagues, and I even worked with a pathological liar (he was in marketing, so it could have been worse), but a full-blown narcissist is something else. I was really taken aback by my first completely self-absorbed boss (a lot of them become bosses) who’s

What Should I Do With My Life

Like his previous work, The Nudist on the Late Shift, Po Bronson’s What Should I Do with My Life: The True Story of People Who Answered the Ultimate Question has an irresistible title. I can’t think of anyone who hasn’t had a moment of doubt about how

Keep Your Receipts!

I go through this cycle where I diligently try to keep all my receipts until I can't stand the sight of them piling up like kindling and I throw them away. But I just figured out (this is the stuff I should have learned in college) that I can reimburse

Blue Mars

I've had some good contract projects, but if I had to pick a favorite, it'd probably be Blue Mars. The development took place during a virtual world craze in the late 2000s, when everyone, including the Second Life people, wanted to make the next Second Life. In fact, I even

Upwork Needs Some Work

I think Upwork could find some contractors on Upwork to polish some rough edges. Like this login screen. Username or Email, Continue with Email is like asking you want fries or salad, continue with salad. And I wasted time trying to remember my username. Then I was invited to join

Nice Award

You don't get potentially lucrative stock options working on government projects, but they generally do a nice job of giving awards, like this poster I got from NASA commemorating the first Hubble servicing mission, including a patch flown on the mission! All just because I worked at the Space Telescope

I Misremember

One of my memorable career experiences was an all-day off-site conflict-resolution gathering held at a nearby hotel conference room. The coworker who somehow was allowed to put this thing together instructed us to take turns confessing what we could have done better (a practice I hear they adopted in North

You Don’t Need a Mentor

It’s easy to issue the same complaints about each new generation of job entrants (setting aside the arbitrariness of partitioning by generation — the labels “millenials”, “gen-X”, “gen-Y” are testaments to marketing). But one thing I found disconcerting while participating in the career-advice site CareerDean (which has since pivoted to

All I Got Was This Lousy Stock Certificate

Back in 1999, I joined a wireless internet startup in San Francisco called Neomar. I left about seven months later after we released our WAP gateway and browser for the Motient service and the company decided to pivot from consumer to B2B, which was what all the VC’s were

The Open Open Office

I wrote this in 2016, so here's hoping post-pandemic we won't go back to packing programmers in like caged hens. I don’t want to be one of those who go on about the good old days, and for software development, there’s a world of difference today. As I