A Good Imagination and a Pile of Junk

So everybody knows I’m deep in the job hunt and sweating it out a bit.

I’m looking for the solution to my primary obstacle. I used to think it was the fact that I spent a year day trading before I’d started looking. But now I know that’s not really it (not that it greases the way so well.)

I’ve been working in the financial industry, usually as a contractor, since my contract at IBM expired in 1998. I’ve worked in Equities, Fixed Income front and middle office, and briefly at NYMEX (Commodities exchange.) So I’m fluent in the kinds of things that happen. I understand how these massive architectures work at a whiteboard level.

But as for deep business-level knowledge of individual issues and instruments? Nada. Sure, I know I worked on a system to trade CMOs, HELOCs, CMBS, CDOs, and on and on. But I couldn’t tell you what happened to the thing once the trade was in the back office. We just would receive confirmation/adjustment/cancellation information and post it to the gui again.

I’ve written a FIX protocol engine from scratch. But that’s a business neutral thing. I sure know how the message is formatted, how sequencing and recovery works. Why it’s reliable and why, before version 4.2 is was a technically vague spec that was subject to interpretation.

But the conversation types? How you respond to a request for allocation information on a large trade? Beats me, I’m the protocol guy. I make the thing the messages travel through, make sure the connection is reliable and manage the accounting to provide the business logic guys with queries and data as appropriate.

See, computers don’t know you’re working with financial data. And once you take away the smokescreen of the symbol names, neither really does the software. In fact, the only reason the programmer needs to know at all is to listen to what the system’s customers (the users) want, then abstract the behavior of those details out of the collected information to create maintainable, safe, runnable systems.

But having bounced all over the industry sub-groups the way I have leaves me in this strange position. I have the technical skills in spades for this stuff. I really do. But when someone says in the job rec they need an equity derivatives guy… that’s not me. If they need someone who understands how traunching works in commercial paper as opposed to a project loan… that’s not me either.

With exceptional frequency I do very well once I sit down in front of someone. If they need me to buy a Fabozzi book and know a bunch of new stuff by Monday, I can do pretty damn well. I soak up knowledge with exceptional rapidity.

But with the market the way it is, getting that initial interview seems a Sisyphean task.

Any ideas how to overcome that?

I haven’t been on a date since August 2008.  The reasons for that are important to me but irrelevant to you (unless you’re YOU in which case you already know.)

Excepting an ill-fated venture in the mid 1990s, I discovered the wonderfully chaotic and fruitful world of online dating in 2002.  Now, at this point in my life a few things were going on that conspired to make this a pretty… adventurous summer.

First and foremost I was finally on the better side of the fight to bring myself out of that horrible “beta male” identity which I’d carried with me for nigh on thirty years.  That’s a longer story than I’m trying to tell.  But the upshot of that is that I was no longer completely blind to the fact that I might not actually be wholly unappealing. Yeah, it was a bit late to be learning this but frankly I think that’s a good thing.  I would have done horrible things with such knowledge in my youth.

Second:  I have a pathological hatred of the telephone.  It gives the illusion of personal contact without any of the feedback of face to face communication.  I can’t stand it.  As it is I feel compelled to fill dead air and will do so with nervous babble at the drop of a hat.  NOT my best medium.

Third: …But I give great email, and great profile.  I have at least a mild facility with language and once I get past the self-conscious hemming and hawing about selling myself, I do alright.

Now, all that’s just background nonsense.  What happened in the summer of 2002 is that I hit the ground running.  I dated… a LOT.

Really.  Lots.  No.  Don’t ask how much.  (And no, THAT’S not what I mean by dating.  Sorry voyeurs, I’m really not that much of a dog.)

Now, none of it ever came to anything.  At no point during that period did I have a girlfriend. Closest I got was a few dates.  And that to me was a fascinating piece of information as I left that dizzying time behind.

After not too terribly long I found myself not quite knowing who it was I was sitting across from.  Conversation became scripted out of habit.  It became a formalized ritual without anything behind it.  Restaurant managers and staff would raise an eyebrow when I came in.  I became sick of my favorite restaurants so I started amping up in the places I would take dates. Before too long I was spending tremendous amounts of money on dinner with women I just wasn’t particularly interested in, not to impress them or make an indiscrete show of wealth but because I was bored.  Finally I realized my head was swimming and nothing was happening, so I put the breaks on and stopped cold.

Months later, after I cooled out, I was able to look back at that frenzy of activity and realize that I couldn’t name more than three or four people I went out with.  I couldn’t tell you much about any them.  It was just too busy.  But I do remember (now) having looked back, thought about someone and said to myself “hey wait… she was nice.”  I realized that I was so caught up in the fact that women would go out with me that I was just racking up numbers.  I couldn’t see who I was sitting across from.

It’s sad really.  But I snapped out of it in time to learn the lesson.  I’ve dated what amounts to far fewer than one person a year since.  Frankly, even that’s a bit much. (In fact I’ve found dating at all to be far far more agitating than rewarding.  Boy could I tell YOU some stories.)

So why did this come up?  Well, I’ve met a bunch of new men and women on twitter lately who seem to me to be caught in the throes of this exact situation.  I don’t know whether it’s the same problem for them that it was for me (hence the personalisation of the point) but it sure seems familiar.

So what say you?  Can you find a real relationship while casting people aside at a rate of four first dates a week?  I don’t believe you can, and I stopped trying 7 years ago.

So yeah, I’m feeling pretty low lately.  What I don’t understand very well is how strong the inverse correlation between my mood and the amount of support I have from good warm-hearted people.

Of course “correlation does not imply causality” and I rather hope that’s strongly the case here.  But I’ve received a rather humbling outpouring of well wishes and general interest an…

…

ok, stop.  Promised I wasn’t going to do this.

I started this post about two hours ago and I’m FAR from the mental/emotional state I was in when I started it, and I think I know why.

I’ve been building my primary box into a linux machine (I just swapped out my 350g for a 500g so if I get fed up I can just swap the SATA cable back in to go back to vista) and it’s had the desired effect. Between that and setting up my mactop with a vga->dvi cable, old keyboard and new craptastic mouse, I now have a poor man’s KVM so I can use the mactop as an alternate desktop.  It’s enough of a mindless makework task that I can do it while sleeping.

Between that and a couple posts here and around and an afternoon of my Pandora blues station, I’m in pretty good shape here.

It’s so odd how I get myself mired in muck and turn around all of a sudden to realize I’m in good spirits but hadn’t realized it.

Recursion, noun:  See recursion.

Look, I love it. I’ve met more awesome people (and let’s face it, they’ve met ME :p) via that goofy little chat thingie than I could possibly have expected, much less hoped.

But it’s no place for a reasonable conversation. Hey, I’m twitchy enough as it is.

What’s mildly entertaining is how long it’s taken me to realize that. It’s obvious enough at first blush, but the whole instant gratification of it is sneakily seductive.

It reminds me in that bizarre tangental way things remind me of things, of having been a member of Social Circles in the early 2ks. After the first few months, I started seeing the patterns of events and the fact that they’d had two a day was far less interesting. The turnover of members was interesting also. I remember hanging out with a core crew (well, two of them really) and I’d go to their happy hour events and wonder where the couple few new cool people from the previous month had gone.

Finally I realized what was happening. People were joining SC, doing a bunch of stuff, meeting people and they were clustering up and leaving. After all it was a multi-thousand dollar a year expense (ah, the good old days) so people were just going to the well, filling their bucket, and leaving.

And I’m starting to see a similar but different phenomenon with twitter. yeah, I’m in the stream most of most days because that’s what life is like now (it’s cheap and mildly social) but over the past week I’ve been trying to have reasonable protracted conversations with a couple/few people and using 140 character increments with polling lag was just brutal.

The evolution of my participation in the forum is really quite something over the last month.

Ah well, onward and upward I suppose.

I swear, some days I just have too much on my mind to be able to do any of the work required to get things off my mind.

Rhetorical Question: How much of life have you missed because something wasn’t quite right?

These are cool and this looks like fun.

They are NOT robots.

Not.

They are remote control guys.

Stop saying they’re robots.

I know the japanese have a hardon about giant human shaped robots, but this ain’t it. It looks to be a reasonable platform for testing things like balance, layout and construction. But they’re not robots.

NOT robots.

Not.

(That goes for those retarded flippy bang-on-each-other thingies too.)

Rabbit Rabbit