Journal Bill Dog's Journal: one of my mental problems 5
Yes, that was plural. One other is that I'm deeply misanthropic. No, not like the Leftie kind. I'm totally with the Left on the belief that people can't be trusted to make the right decisions. But my religion (which is a reference point to my politics, and not one in the same), or my God, commands me to love and forgive others for their failings [if only I could apply that to myself!], and to recognize that despite being highly flawed, my species (i.e. not realy about race, or gender, or other, for me, although I have my prejudices) that I despise so much was made in the image of God and unlike the rest of creation possess cores that will live on past this very beautiful and at the same time very ugly physical world.
So I've never been like for example my sister when she was in college (studying biology/chemistry at UC Berkeley) who wanted to invent something that would, as she put it, wipe out all the human beings so that the animals could live in peace. Nor am I like more adult-thinking Lefties, in feeling that the masses should be enslaved in some sense, for their own good (and that of the earth, and fairness/some universal cosmic karma I guess, etc.)
But though I'm not as bad as maybe around 1/3rd of Americans who are solid Left, it's still something I want to work on.
And then another would be the constant mini-digressions, that I'm prone to, that can be seen in the first couple of paragraphs here. I think this condition of mine manifests itself, in my writing, in lots of parenthetical clauses, and lots of commas, to break up the subthoughts of a thought, and to separate out the hyperlinked if you will related illuminating or context-adding pieces to a thought.
You see, if I don't try really hard to control it, I'm naturally an incoherent mess. So that's another I continously try to work on.
But it's also this second one that leads me to the third and last one I can think of, which is the real topic of this JE. (!)
I constantly get caught up in my own little world, in my head.
From a work performance aspect, I think I was born to be a programmer because I can get in the zone quickly, and get in deep. And I think I create stuff expressed in a way that makes sense, and is robust.
But from a soft skills aspect of work performance, it hurts me badly.
1) In meetings I'm constantly zoning out. My mind frequently wanders back to the issues at hand in the quiet, individual, at-my-desk part of my job. Sometimes unnoticed by me the conversation has meandered to something I've worked on and a question gets posed to me all of sudden, requiring the context of what has transpired so far to interpret. This is hugely embarassing, and is not so swell for my career.
I don't know what to do about this except just try to remember to stay focused on all the floundering around and illogic that the idiots I work with do in meetings, and probably in their own minds.
2) Now I don't think everyone is an idiot of course, and I actually like some of the idiots I work with, because they're nice (goes a long way with me/I can overlook a lot with that), and so my frustration and disappointment with another manifestation of this condition. So I'm deep in thought in what I'm doing, and someone comes by at the end of the (or their) day just to be friendly and social and say goodnight. Like a slug I often just mumble uh-huh or something.
This really hurts, because I don't want to be that way, I'm not really that way when I'm, well, of a fully conscious (of my surroundings) mindset. I really like to socialize with the nice people (who are so few (in today's working world in general?)), I'm just not my "normal" self when I'm engrossed in something. So I come across as a cretan, and so undoubtedly also affecting my working relationships and success.
3) The final aspect of this is that so much time or such frequent trips to my own little world, also coincides with an unhealthy amount of introspection. Don't get me wrong, I treasure my introspective abilities, in a land of what I think are mostly oblivious dullards. But in the workplace, and sometimes in social situations, I would really like some effing obliviousness, as far as internal that is.
Because one deadly way this manifests is in, broadly, public speaking. My somewhat proneness to anxiety attacks are physiological and not psychological, it seems to me, so that's not really part of what I'm talking about here. But examining my voice and my self for cues of it, worrying about if or how much it's coming across, really makes me dysfunctional in orally presenting.
Because of this I dropped most every course in college that included a speech, because I know how my body freaks out (while mentally I'm not worrying about anything, except my body freaking out!). I.e. it's not a preparedness thing, about knowing my topic well enough, or anything like that.
But whatever it is, this also holds me back (as another example I can totally block during a job interview, on something I know full well), and I don't know what to do about that. My mind wants to zone out and focus inward, at the most inopportune times, and it means I don't get to convey to the team everything that I want to about something I've done or researched, and it means I can sometimes just stop, and then the anxiety builds as I can't get myself to focus on getting back to where I was because I'm stuck in worrying about how long it's going to take for me to regain focus! (Usually it's an external stimulus that snaps me back to the task at hand, like someone speaking or otherwise some kind of noise.)
I don't have ADHD or whatever, as I can almost always get myself to sit and read a book and study something for long periods of time. I get engrossed in a movies.
So I'm normal, yet I also grapple with being normal. I don't know how people switch so fast, between deep thinking and social awareness, and how they think and communicate* at the same time without their minds being violently distracted by related thoughts.
*Maybe that programming involves being constantly mindful of related concerns is why I can think and communicate to a computer at the same time.
[Edit: Hit the wrong button while checking for typos; regret if this means redundant notifications get sent out by this system.]
Actually I think this ability is extraordinary (Score:2)
As in, ordinary "Neurotypical" people are not capable of it.
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Unfortunately I think getting hired and doing well on "performance" reviews is mostly about how "normal" or un extra-normal one can appear. It seems to be mostly about social maturity now.
As if the non-technical managers who thought to hire the most brilliant and/or skilled people they could, even if they were a bit quirky, have all died off, and now they only consider "doing well" to be skilled at holding ones own in the office politics game.
(Because you'd never be a good manager if you can't play that g
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There's an easy answer for that, once you've had 16+ years in the industry, and I stumbled onto it by accident, and thanks to this one weird tip I have gotten a raise every few months.
That weird tip: keep your Dice, Monster, and Linked In profiles active and up to date.
I'm not currently looking for a change, but last week I had 48 hours in which I had 12 recruiter calls. And I've been able to wrangle a 2%-4% raise out of every job change for the past three years.
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> out of every job change for the past three years.
I guess you're saying you do contract work. It takes me longer than the average person to learn a new business domain and system and code base and libraries and frameworks used, so I don't think 6-12 month jobs is for me. I don't start to pass others until after a couple of years.
> once you've had 16+ years in the industry
I'm under assumption that hurts me instead of helps (so I hide it by following conventional wisdom and only showing the last 10 y
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For contracting, it helps immensely. But something must have changed in the past week. I went from 5 recruiter contacts a week to 35 in the past week. I no longer look for jobs- jobs look for me. (I estimate, from the request numbers, that those 35 contacts represent 18 jobs at 5 companies, including the one I'm currently working at).