Current Location: York, England

I couldn’t help myself.

In spite of my best efforts to not think about work or career while on this trip, I went ahead and did it any way. I brought up AOL Instant Messenger and contacted a couple of co-workers, and found out that while I’ve been gone, sixteen people have been laid off from the parent company, including the one developer who, with me, constituted the entire PHP knowledge base in our company. Casualties also included one QA engineer and a host of marketing people, demonstrating beyond doubt that our emphasis is neither on keeping our product functioning nor on etting new people to use it.

Am I surprised by this news? Hardly. Remember, the entire purpose of our company is to act as a draining mechanism for spare funding from the companies that feed us. I think we operate on the assumption that these major corporations that support us have too much money than is healthy and they need somewhere to spend it; it’s the same principle that caused medieval and Renaissance physicians to prescribe leeches to remove excess blood from sick patients. Our customer base is minimal, and is the joke of the development staff. Even the head of development, a man with whom I agree very rarely when it comes to management style, has expressed dismay at the small number of users we have.

Now, do I fear that there will be no job waiting for me when I get back? No. The branch of the company that I work for is the only branch of the company which is actually showing a profit. In January, this fact led to the CEO of the company creating a new structure which allowed the rest of the company to share profits from all branches, completely dismantling the structure which had all separate branches functioning as essentially separate companies. Since we only have two developers working for this branch, there is no fear that we will suffer the falling axe, even though there are hints that some of the Member Services team in our branch might get hit.

What I am worried about, though, is that with the loss of 13% of our work force, and a freeze on new hiring (especially in development, though there is always, apparently, room for new managers), the amount of work for our staff will increase rapidly. And with the focus on new projects and a corporate environment which puts an emphasis on ignoring old products once they’re finished, regardless of whether they work, I’m afraid that this will essentially mean that my own role will become even more so that of the straight HTML developer. Not that HTML is a bad thing, of course; but it’s much more interesting and fun to build the back end of websites and the middleware, not the front end. I’ve done everything I have wanted to do with HTML, and I don’t believe that there is any room for my HTML skills to grow; it no longer challenges or interests me. This is why my personal webpage is written in PHP now instead of HTML — it’s easier to maintain this way, so I can spend time developing content and let the PHP take care of the presentation.

It’s hard to feel enthusiastic about this job, I’m not proud of this job, and I don’t especially enjoy talking about this job unless I absolutely have to — like now, when my sense of frustration mixed with a sense of vindication (I’d been expecting these layoffs for months, and no one within the company believed me when I told them that they were coming) interferes with my enjoyment of this vacation. As I’ve written before, this job feels like a fake job, and not one that I feel is very useful to the world at large. After all, you could spend millions of dollars trying to convince monkeys to eat apples, but the truth is that monkeys will pretty much eat bananas, even if the apples are free — and our product is designed to be a portal to on-line services for a clientele which our own focus groups and studies show don’t trust technology anyway; it’s like spending the money trying to get monkeys to eat apples even when you’ve done study after study proving that monkeys only like to eat bananas.

This job’s primary advantage has been that it helped pay the bills while I spent my spare time learning Java and other skills that might one day land me in a career that I not only enjoyed, but which I felt I could take some pride in. And so now my fear is that I will no longer be able to take that one single advantage. My fear is that now this job will not only feel like a fake job to me, it will now be a fake job which does nothing to interest or challenge me, or offer room for growth.