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I was picked last today… again*. Unfortunately it wasn’t a soccer game, but real life. I was let go from my current job. After one of my previous posts I realized what the adult version of childhood insecurity really feels like. More tangible concerns than wondering what folks think about me. How am I going to provide for my family? While I struggled for a few days to come to terms with losing my job I emerged somewhat renewed and excited about the new opportunities that lay ahead. I’m not sure what exactly happened. I should have been angry and upset. I certainly didn’t agree with some of the logic involved, but it did force me to take a good look at myself. When I did I realized that I could’ve done a few things differently, but that ultimately it was not my decision or my actions that left me unemployed. I could live with that. But still something more lingered insider.

In the following weeks, what I truly struggled with was beyond just a job, but a genuine sense of loss. A year ago I was the first employee at this small startup, taking a huge pay cut to have a chance to be a part of building something from the ground up. I put my life and family on hold, dropped out of my masters program and worked 12 and 16 hour days, every day for four months straight. I was wholeheartedly invested in this company because I felt like I was finally building something worthwhile, something that I could be proud of at the end of the day. The sense of loss was deeper than I expected, maybe almost as bad as losing a dear pet or something of that nature. I hadn’t realized my emotional attachment to this job until I noticed the absence of something. Back in March I went into the ER with stomach pains. Many tests, medications and months later and still no clear diagnosis and no relief. Then I lost my job and somewhere in the following weeks I just stopped noticing the pain because it was gone. To say I was stressed at this job is obviously an understatement. The pressures at a very small company are immense, every action or inaction impacts the very existence of the company. For several months I was able to channel that stress into the creative process of building a new product, but for various reasons the product was put on hold and the stress needed a new target.

So what is the grand lesson I’m supposed to have learned and now impart from this experience? I haven’t a clue. Was I foolish to invest so much into something I didn’t really own or have control over? Perhaps, but restraining that energy probably would not have yielded any better results and probably would’ve felt a little dishonest.  Justin K. has declared September as the “No Woe-Is-Me” month and I think that honoring this idea has helped me gain some perspective (thanks Justin). Losing a job is a tough ordeal. I’d like to think that I’ve learned some things about myself and what is reasonable to emotionally invest into work, but man have I got this great idea for a startup…

* ok, not today, really a few weeks ago

Doctors have long been the most revered members of society. The medical profession is very noble in its aims to cure and ease suffering. Without the medical arts we as humans would be far worse off. We hold doctors up on high because of their abilities to see the human body in ways the average person does not. But what is it that doctors really do? They heal people, the cure disease, they enable longer life. All true, but in short they are fixers. They specialize in debugging the human body. So why should software engineers matter more to society? Computers and technology have been a boon to humanity for many obvious reasons, but the software engineers are more than just fixers, they are creators. They have created applications and tools that have become so ubiquitous that we don’t just take them for granted, we don’t even notice them anymore.

Picture the scene in Saving Private Ryan with a room full of women in the typing pool tapping out death notifications. The skill required then was immense. Typos were very costly and speed was of utmost importance. Fast forward to today (or even 20 years ago) and the word processor. Here is an application, created by software engineers, that brought typing skills to the masses. No longer did you need to futz with ribbons and jammed keys and correction fluid. Even the need for good spelling and proper grammar has been lifted. Some may say this dumbed us down a bit, but I stand on the side of the argument that says it has freed us to do something else with a time and mental ability. Writing a blog for instance. Sure without doctors I may contract some disease and suffer and lose time and mental ability, but the doctor is only preserving those two, not adding capacity. Software Engineers have created something that in turn increases everyone’s potential to create something else.

Look at the education required of a doctor. College, medical school, internship, residency.  A great deal of education is invested in these folks because we as a society justifiably place a high premium on human life. Yet a software engineer does not even require a degree to practice in a field that respects and adds immense potential to the value of life. The irony is that the doctor trains that long to avoid making one mistake that could cost one life, to be the best fixers possible. Yet some of the most helpful tools out there have come from software engineers who don’t even have a degree.

The point of this post is not about more respect for software engineers, but to emphasize the contribution they make to us all. Doctors keep the machine running, fix things when they break and implement maintenance programs. Software engineers do all this and more, they enable the machine to do new things, things it didn’t have time to contemplate before. Which do you think is the greater contribution to society?

A few horrible acts of animal cruelty (and here) came to light yesterday that really had a number of folks justifiably enraged. I wholeheartedly agree that these acts were awful and should be condemned in every way possible. What struck me though was how much the first event stirred folks up. Recently a woman was kidnapped and held prisoner for a week of torture, rape and other abuse, yet there was little to nothing on this in my little view of the blogosphere. This poor dog was tortured and killed and it became a call to arms for animal rights. I’m not saying that it shouldn’t evoke this emotion, but what is about the kidnapped woman in WV that doesn’t evoke that emotion?

Perhaps part of the problem is that as a society we’ve become somewhat numb to the “if it bleeds it leads” aspect of traditional media. It is not that we don’t care, it is that we hear about it often enough and we become desensitized – “oh, there was another murder in some bad neighborhood”. Its almost come to the point that its shocking and surprising when we don’t hear about someone being shot or a bad neighborhood making progress towards safer streets. There is also certianly the case that we as humans have more control over our actions. We are capable of rationalizing the consequences of our decisions and therefore get what we deserve when things go wrong. But what did this woman really do wrong? I’m not sure, but it could have been as simple as stopping at the wrong gas station at the wrong time. In this small slice of time was she any less innocent than a kitten that wondered into the wrong yard?

The way we view animals or, I believe, more specifically in this case, the way we view our pets is the critical catalyst for the call to arms. We love our pets, they are a part of our family. I always make a point of stopping by the pet stores to check out the cats for adoption in the hopes that maybe we’ll get one more. Of course my wife is always quick to remind me about the cat to person ratio in any household and crossing the fine line into crazy-cat-persondom, but that is another story. The point is that our pets are in our homes, part of our lives and love us unconditionally because we provide for them and accept them as part of our family, magnifying their perceived innocence. So when some degenerate attacks one of these loved ones it is easy to project that offense to our little dependent house-mates.

The question now is how can we get that sense of outrage back in to the causes of human suffering? This is not to take anything away from how we jump up to defend our pets, but what does it take to evoke that same emotion in local instances of human suffering? What do you think?