Matthew Botos

I enjoy Morgan Spurlock’s work; both Super Size Me and 30 Days provide a fresh, provocative look at modern issues. It got me thinking: how would each of us cope if we had to live a lifestyle opposite to our own for 30 days?

The first step in this thought experiment is figuring out what that personally meaningful opposite is, be it a belief, lifestyle, or position on a certain issue. For me, I think something that shapes my life significantly is the regular use of computers. It’s how I earn a living, communicate with friends and family, and even meet women. How would I fare if unplugged for a month?

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Turning 30 is intimidating because it’s supposed to be a milestone: you look back at the fun times and early accomplishments of your 20’s as you look towards settling into a more serious life in your 30’s. Of course, 30 is a pretty arbitrary age for any accomplishment, so perhaps it’s better spent just taking stock of the last decade and the next to come.

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I’ve been in my new job for 6 months now, which is long enough to take a look at the bigger picture of that change:

The transition was tougher than I expected; changing companies is a much bigger shakeup than changing projects. I had gotten comfortable with the latter; even though there was an adjustment period, the corporate culture was the same and I had grown a large network there. It probably took a good three months to assimilate, and I’m still putting together the bigger picture of this new company and new industry.

The proverbial grass is greener in spots, though interviewers conveniently don’t mention the brown patches, or the occasional dog turd. The project was in worse technological shape than advertised, though I’ve learned a lot about good & bad architecture, reverse engineering, and refactoring in the process. There’s also a lot of opportunity in the turnaround; I got to be scrum master and lead the implementation of test-driven development and other modern practices.

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I noticed Cheri tagged her Myers-Briggs personality indicator on del.icio.us, prompting me to find my own and confirm that I’m just wired a certain way. Here are some bits of the INTJ - The Free-Thinker profile that struck home for me:

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One of the very different things at my new job is how prevalent the use of contractors is, though it provides some interesting moments. My team currently includes a software architect in London, 3 on-site contractors, and an entire test team in India.

Those of us on-site go out for lunch every Friday, and this week we hit up a Mexican restaurant with one of the new contractors, who’s in the US from India for the first time. He was adventurous enough to try some Mexican food, which led to the interesting scene of one (Italian) Amerian, one Russian, and one more acclimated Indian trying to explain the nuances of various meat, cheese, and tortilla combinations. It worked out OK in the end; he got a couple of beef tacos and cleaned his plate

Since I’m approaching 30, you’d think I’d have figured this out by now. I used to think I did: work hard, keep learning, and ultimately advance along a technical path on merit. Of course, that discounted the realities of office politics, Putt’s Law, and a business mindset often still focused on advancement only through the management chain. With them in mind, though, I’ve continued to pursue the goal of a more formal technical leadership position while carving out smaller leadership and project management roles along the way.

Technical leadership, to me, means keeping engaged and abreast of technology in order to guide the overall direction of a project and a small team to a successful delivery. This seemed to match the more hierarchical team lead interpretation of scrum master on my previous project, where the power and decision-making was largely concentrated in the “inner circle” that the scrum of scrums became. I take no credit for the term, but it’s totally apt - individual developers and even technical area leaders like myself were largely out of the loop.

Seeing the scrum master role as a facilitator and more of a project management role in this week’s training challenges that assumption. When I served as a scrum master before, I certainly found it to be more of that than technical direction. And it that respect is was still satisfying work - having the real pulse of the team and being engaged with many people to keep it beating. Growing as a technical leader also still appeals to me, though I’ve yet to see an organization or a pure enough scrum implementation where that kind of responsibility and authority naturally grows out of an individual role.

In summary, I suppose I’ve figured out one or two places I want to go, and am still working on finding and walking the right path to get there.

An op-ed this week in the Wall Street Journal argued that The Next Sexual Revolution is better technology for freezing eggs and later pregnancies. The new plan for ambitious, career-oriented women is apparently to freeze your young eggs, throw yourself into your career, and then have a child alone at 50.

I have a tough time seeing that actually work. My younger friends who are having kids find it’s an exhausting enterprise even with two parents, and I can’t imagine it gets easier with age or while you’re trying to maintain a career and a family on your own. There’s also an important distinction between “having a child” and “raising a family”.

Overall, it seems like a lot of people have forgotten that life is a balance and its different phases have different priorities. As the author notes, compromises are possible, even in more competitive fields like medicine.

The younger generation (Gen X, Y, and the Millenials) are supposedly more focused on this balance, though the self-described passions of my online and offline dates are more split. About half are passionate about their careers, the other half their family and friends, and ostensibly starting families of their own. My own passions are still listed as travel and photography, though in practice I devote more time to looking for the right person to start that next phase of life - and a family.

As a satisfied seven-year customer of Netbank, I was surprised to hear the FDIC Shuts Down NetBank Due to Defaults. For an Internet-only bank, they’ve been quite solid while paying above-average interest rates. They also offered free online bill paying while local banks were still trying to make a quick buck on it. Unfortunately, it seems they got sucked into the housing bubble and wrote too many bad mortgages.

It is a bit disconcerting to read about it online instead of getting an email from Netbank itself. They do seem to have a decent transition plan; logging into my account brought up a message that by Sunday night transactions would resume under ING’s ownership. That’s a quick turnaround over the weekend and convenient since I would’ve moved my money to ING anyway. Speaking of which, you don’t think of that $100,000 FDIC insurance much these days, but it certainly saved a bunch of people’s money yesterday.

From a technical point of view, I was curious how they could manage to move such a large financial system in two days and on a weekend no less. The simple solution, though, is likely a non-technical one: it’s all the same hardware, software, and people, just operating under different owners.

I’ve had my kitten Meadow for just about five weeks, though it already feels like she’s always been a part of my family. People have always told me cats are great company, and now I definitely agree.

It’s fun to have someone else around, even when she is getting into trouble. My place definitely looks a little more lived in: cat toys and other things she’s taken an interest in lying around, dirt pawed out of the plants, and grains of litter kicked around the bathroom. (I did pick up a good tip on the plants: put a layer of small stones over the dirt. Looks a little more elegant, too.)

I’ve had to get a bit better about defending my food; we’re still working on the concepts of “people food” vs “cat food”. But she more than makes up for the trails, by making a nice nest out of my lap while I’m on the couch or in front of the computer. (I’m one secret volcano away from becoming a Bond villian!)

For as disciplined as I am about investing, there’s one beginning rule I’ve always ignored: buy what you know. I came across this a long time ago, and the theory went that you should buy some stock in the companies whose products you use and have some connection to, making it more likely that you’ll take an interest in the news and performance of your investment.

Instead, I’ve opted for a broadly diversified portfolio of index and sector funds. The only single company stock I own is in my employer, which has actually beat the market a good number of the years I’ve been there.

That changed today, though - I bought stock in two companies who I believe in  and have been a longtime customer. They’re innovators, first movers who offer a superior product that I believe will outlive their cheaper imitators. My new picks? Tivo and Netflix.