Oh, bouy... I really need to find a job

This will be viewed as a strange blog entry, I am sure. I am currently employed, at a pretty decent rate of pay, for a company that is nice to work for, and expects very little or nothing from me on a day-to-day basis. I wear a different NFL jersey to work each day. I have my own little cubical. I spend most of the day surfing the net at random. Sounds great right?

This is what worries me. You know and I know that the real world just ain't like that. I'd swap my current gig in split second for a hardcore software engineering position.

How did we get here, and why would you swap such a sweet gig for a hardcore position? I have wondered about these questions for a long time.

Basically, my firm feeds the banking industry with inteligence. Any bank that wants to subscribe can find out what the other 8,000 banks in the U.S. are up to, in just about any financial LOB. Unfortunately, you all know where the U.S. banking industry is today. Just in case you don't know, I'll spell it out: the banking industry is in the shithouse. I'm talking about deep shit.

To be real honst, my company has been great to me. Despite the complete lack of work for me to do, in this present environment, they have been happy to just carry me along, waiting for the up turn. I am concerned that that upturn is a long ways away. I believe there is going to be a massive explosion of foreclosures in the near future. This is going to hurt the banks somethin' fierce. The only alternative is a massive explosion of large loan modifications. The result of either event will be identical from the banker's point of view: Holders of bad paper are going to be grevously wounded by either case.

I want to be clear that our firm is not yet hurting. We are making a profit each and every month. We are in the black, not the red. We have shed some dead weight. Revenues are more or less what they have been in the past 3 years. We are flat. In this economy, that is a miracle, and we are doing fine. However, I worry about this situation...

We have had early warnings that the firm knows it is overstaffed in the MIS/IT department. They know that we don't have a job to do every day. They know they can save some significant money by letting one or two of us go. It could easily happen soon, if a big boom in business doesn't take up the surplus slack time.

There is another fact that is incredibly important here. The shelf life of a commerical programmer is not good. Sitting on the shelf, waiting for a project to design and implement, will ruin you. You can do exercises. You can read about the latest tech. You can try to use it. The fact of the matter is that you will never ever master a new piece of technology until the month or two when you have a serious project with your career on the line. Exigency is the mother of mastery in software engineering. When you sit on the shelf, you get stale, just like bread. You skills weaken as the world advances and your skills become outdated.

We continue to do birthday parties, holiday parties, Valentine's Day luncheons, Fancy Fridays, etc. We just don't build any software projects. You would think that the bosses would use these surplus programmer hours to build the system of their dreams. Nope. It's not happening here.

I have been sitting on the shelf for nearly a year now. We are approaching the limit. Just a little bit more and I will be stale. That is very dangerous. It is dangerous to venture forth in this lousy economy also. Ergo, this is a dangerous point in my career.

I guess the Buddhist thing to do is to realize that nothing is ever as real as it may seem, and you should try to enjoy the lightness and ease of the present moment.