Being a T1000 would make being soul-less more fun

(Repost - to fix the odd formatting problems. I do hate blogger sometimes)

Blast from the past - This is another post which I wrote over 4 months ago and never got around to posting. Enjoy!

At a late night function with co-workers, I had a colleague bring along her friend who is a beautician for a local hair-dresser. She introduced herself and told us her profession and then asked what we did. My manager at the time mentioned that she worked in IT as a Program Manager. Our beautician friend was impressed and a brief glance could tell she was mildly intimidated by being a blue-collar worker amongst a sea of white-collar technologists.

So my manager started to put down the entire IT field as boring, cold and soul-less. And then started exalting the joys of being a beautician: how they get to be creative, how they get to work with new people every day and so on. My boss enjoys her job, and I greatly suspect her saying this was just a NLP technique to win the other person's approval over or perhaps to allay any feelings of inferiority.

Whilst I'm completely aware that being a beautician can be a rewarding career from a personal stand point, I don't see the need to degrade working in IT in the process. Being vaguely experienced in social interaction, something tells me that ragging on anything, particularly your own job is a form of whining and it has a great chance of backfiring on you.

The tech industries (pure software, Telco, IT support organizations) are at its core, engineering services. Wikipedia defines it as "discipline, art and profession of acquiring and applying technical, scientific and mathematical knowledge to design and implement materials, structures, machines, devices, systems, and processes that safely realize a desired objective or inventions."

Notice how it says both a discipline and an art. This is a reason why engineers get respect. You have to be both disciplined like a soldier and sometimes as creative as an painter in order to get the work done. The word itself is Latin for cleverness. What we do changes the lives of hundreds, maybe thousands of people for the better. Perhaps it is because I haven't been working for long enough to become jaded and broken, but I still believe in my profession and industry as outlets for something amazing.

So yes, I can totally believe your job is fantastic. I'm sure there is some aspect in your job that is significantly better than mine. And I'm sure something about my job rocks over yours. At the end of the day, let's celebrate our professions, our industry and our lives, not complain about it.