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.