So here’s the thing…for ten years plus, my career has revolved around the Macintosh. Goes back to the days in grad school when I spent all evening with my old Power Mac 6100 – evenings that could have been more profitably spent, you know, studying – trying to squeeze an extra 20K of free RAM out of the system heap by doing without this extension or that CDEV or by installing some crazy utility (RAMDoubler, anybody?) or just by rebooting and rebuilding the desktop one more time.
Thing is, I’ve devoted a lot of time to this. I’ve lived and worked through the OS X transition, the Intel transition, the iPod and iPhone era, and I’ve seen things change to the point where the same money that bought 16 MB of RAM when I started now buy you a slick 13″ widescreen laptop with RAM and hard drive measured in gigabytes, complete with wireless networking and DVD burning. At one point, I had all the same technical training and qualifications required to be a Mac Genius in the Apple Store (albeit without any of the customer-service training, which honestly was fine by me. I stalled for over a year on taking my “Civil Treatment” course at my first job and left without ever having it, my logic being that I would take a course in Civil Treatment as soon as I started getting some, but I digress). Even now, I’ve passed the first qualifying test for 10.5 certification, and passed it handily without taking the associated course.
The nut of the matter is this: I am a Mac tech, and if I say so myself, I’m a pretty damn good one.
The problem is, I’ve about maxed out what I can do in terms of desktop and workstation support. I see the job listings for Macintosh tech support, and I see what they pay, and it’s not a pretty sight if you’re looking in terms of future earnings…especially when a fresh crop of MIS grads gets popped out every May, all as thrilled as I was ten years ago to be making THAT KIND OF MONEY OMG NO MORE RAMEN NOODLES!!
Clearly, if I’m going to move forward, I have to do something else. Problem is, the next step up is “system administrator,” and there just doesn’t seem to be that much out there in terms of Macintosh system administration. There’s also Mac sales, but let’s be honest, I’ve got no future in sales. Anybody who knows me will tell you that. And the really galling thing is that when I took the job I have now, it came with worse benefits than I got from a non-profit eleven years ago. I don’t think there’s a job out there that’s going to let me start with the kind of leave you earn after ten years’ service.
Thing is, I spent much of last week reading myself to sleep with a book called The Nudist on the Late Shift. I first read it in 1999, when it captured a snapshot from across the Silicon Valley ecosystem at the height of the boom. I clearly remember reading it and thinking “do I have what it takes to go be part of that?” Unfortunately, the boom is over, and while there’s some crazy stuff out there in the Web 2.0 era, they’re not raining six-figure salaries and bonus options on janitors and waitresses to come work at PimentoLoaf.com anymore. It really seems like the days of plentiful money, ample leave, and generous helpings of adventure and excitement and really wild things have gone by the boards, and with them the opportunity for easy mobility. I think that sending out a resume looking for my fourth job in five years – or worse yet, eighteen months from now, my fifth job in seven years – is asking for trouble, not to mention a long slide back to 1 in the grand game of Career Chutes and Ladders.
So what I’m trying to figure out is this: what else is out there? If I’m not really crazy about sales, or management, and my entire career has been spent on one platform with limited experience on any other (and that spent integrating it with the first one, mostly), what else is there that will still give me the opportunity to see more than a 1% raise ever again, take more than three sick days a year, give me the scratch to buy my nephews the GI Joe with the Kung Fu Grip and still wake up at 7 AM Monday morning without immediately screaming in agony?
If I could figure that out…well shit, I wouldn’t be wasting my time blogging at you folks, I’d be doing it and lighting up the cigars at 5 PM daily.
I disagree. I used to comb through resumes before I jumped ship to hang out in my jammies all day. I, and our management, would seriously question someone who had been at their job longer than a few years. “Don’t they have any drive? Ambition? Are they slackers willing to settle for whatever they can get?”
I think you should give yourself credit for recognizing you want/need a change and having the balls to go about getting it.
Now what you should do? I think write political and sports related stuff, but that’s easier said than done isn’t it?
Oh, and I wrote that while upgrading George Clooney to 2.0. Am I going to bang my head against the wall when it is finished? Mary-Lynn posted she’s having trouble with apps and battery life, but that because she is using her iPhone in Singapore? And if I have those troubles can I revert? And do I need to send you a check to cover the helpdesk-esque question? 😎
A manager of mine years ago once told me that a computer system is a computer system. It doesn’t matter which one you know, because they’re all similar enough that you can learn the others if needed.
If there aren’t many Mac platform jobs, I would suggest that maybe you’ll have to change platforms. Sure, you may not know the platform specifics at first, but what’s far more important is that you know how to apply the technology, whatever it is. The rest is just details.
I’ve made several platform shifts in my career, most recently from an all-Microsoft shop to a Java/Oracle/Solaris (now moving to Linux) shop. It’s not that big a deal, really; the basic concepts are all pretty much the same.
That said, Shell’s advice that you get into writing isn’t so bad, either…