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There are any number of differences between working as a consultant and working as an employee.  And there are some similarities.  Today I ran across an unexpected similarity.  The company I work for now, as an employee, has undergone significant growth in the past couple of years and they are going through all the growing pains you might expect as a result.

The group I joined in January 2007 no longer exists.  The project we were slated to drive forward architecturally no longer exists.  The manager, and my three peers, have all moved on to other opportunities.  Since December I have been in a bit of a holding pattern, waiting for various reorganizations to be announced, so that I can make a decision between two divergent options.

I’ve continued to work in the architecture role on a new project while waiting to learn more about a potential new position, in a new group being formed as a result of the latest reorganization.  Now that the group is public knowledge I can talk with its manager to determine if I have a role there and, moreover, if I want that role.  The other alternative I’ve been weighing was described to me as “lead developer.”  This position would have design responsibilities for a project as well as development responsibilities - picking up the requirements from business analysis and driving them through design, construction, and implementation.

What I didn’t realize until this morning, was that my current role, that of architect, is going away.  I don’t have the option of passing on both opportunities.  (Well, I suppose I have the option to leave the company entirely.)  In the consulting world you spend a fair amount of time worrying about the contract; will it be renewed, what contract will follow this one?  Today I rediscovered the anxiety of changing jobs within your employment.  Today I’m an architect, tomorrow I’m a senior software engineer; today I’m a project leader, tomorrow I’m chief assistant to the assistant chief.

The emotions are roughly the same - anxiety, fear, uncertainty - for both.  Losing ones contract (expectedly or unexpectedly) casts you adrift.  Realizing that your career has come to a fork in the road (whether by your design or not) also casts you adrift.  As a consultant I was cast adrift several times, often resulting in cross-country moves.  As an employee in the 1980s and 1990s, I had various career changes within the same employment, that cast me adrift within the company.

My initial reaction this morning, upon realizing that staying in my current role wasn’t an option, was to feel cut adrift again.  However, after reflecting for a while, I realized that in the past when I “had” to change roles within a company it always was good for me, and for my career.  I’m adrift, but it is known waters, in sight of the shore.  There is still some anxiety about which part of the shoreline to approach, but either will ultimately be good.

Tags: emotion, employment

For the first time in several years, I am free of my cell phone contract.  When I moved to Kansas in 2004, my cell phone was nearing the end of its two-year obligation.  Without realizing the consequences (and without being told about them) I called Cingular and changed my phone number to the new area code.  Turns out that this change added a full year to the contract.

I kept that phone for the additional year, and then some, before upgrading to a Sony-Ericsson W600i, which I still have today.  The contract for the W600i ended yesterday.  If my memory is correct, the phone without a contract would have been close to $400 new.  The two-year contract cost me roughly $960, so I guess that makes my average monthly cost, for the past two years, approximately $23.30. ((960-400)/24)

The only phone available today that interests me is the Apple iPhone.  However, I can’t justify the additional $20 a month the required data plan would cost, not to mention the $400 cost of the phone itself.  The per-month cost would be over $76 ($400 for the phone + $60/month for two-years = $1840/24 = $~76.67), an amount nearly double what I am paying today.

So instead of rushing out and buying the latest gadget and committing myself to a higher phone bill, I’ll keep this phone for now, and celebrate not having a contract for a while.

Tags: apple, cellphone, contract, iphone

After thirty-one years of getting paper paychecks or pay stubs, tomorrow will mark the first occasion of my receiving an electronic pay statement.  My employer, in an effort to avoid paying the increased mass mailing postage rate, has decided to stop mailing associates, who use direct deposit, pay stubs.  Over the course of a year they estimate this will save the company in the neighborhood of $80,000.

The online site, provided by ADP, allows me to view and or print my pay checks, and shows a handy list of this year’s activity by default.  My employer has been generous in providing ample information about the switch, given us all a full month (two pay cycles) to get used to the idea.  However, I still find the idea of not having an official, printed pay stub unnerving.  Somewhere in a box I have years and years worth of old pay stubs, carefully clipped together by year.  Yes, they are gathering dust, and yes, I probably won’t ever need to look at them again, but I have them.  I can touch them.  With the switch to electronic pay statements I lose the physicalness of my pay.

Now my pay is truly just a stream of digits electronically transmitted between my employer’s bank and my credit union.  My purchases are increasingly all electronic as well, I can go weeks without any cash in my pockets, so I suppose it is fitting that the income is paperless now, too.

Still, I think we’ll be printing off the electronic statements and saving the paper copy in a drawer or a box for a while.  Old dogs can (and do) learn new tricks, but just the ones they like.

Tags: employment, paperless, pay

The townhouse where we live is near to a major rail corridor through town.  The city newsletter this week informed us of a multi-million dollar project to make improvements to the eleven grade crossings inside the city that will allow them to petition the Federal government for a “quiet zone.”  This would mean that the 80, yes eighty, trains a day traversing these tracks would no longer be required to sound their horn for each crossing.

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Eleven crossings times three (or more) horn soundings per crossing times eighty trains a day is 2640 trains horns per day.  Here’s to hoping the improvements occur quickly and that the exemption is granted.

Tags: map, noise abatement, train

This is the tale of buying a portable digital piano keyboard.  The final decision involved two brick and mortar stores, hours of Internet research, several online retailers, and ultimately came down to customer service.  

Bad Customer Service

Sibylle has wanted a good portable, digital piano keyboard for her studio for a while.  A good keyboard with fully-weighted keys, and some MIDI software on a computer would give her some additional composition and teaching opportunities.  She spent quite a bit of time researching options within her budget before venturing out to the piano store to get some expert advice, and a chance to play some of the models in which she was interested.  As the piano store only had digital pianos, and Sibylle was wanting a portable keyboard, her friend there suggested that she visit a nearby Guitar Center location, as they carried a large selection of keyboards within her budget range.

The salesman at Guitar Center was extremely helpful, answering all of her questions thoughtfully and clearly.  When her final selection turned out to be the one keyboard not left in their inventory, he offered to take 10% off the price for the demonstration unit.  After a careful inspection revealed no blemishes, she agreed to his terms.

Unfortunately the salesman’s manager had a distinctly different idea about the discount available.  Had the piano been purchased and then returned it would be an “open box item,” and would be eligible for a 10% discount.  As a “floor model” it was only eligible for a 5% discount.  The manager was unwilling to negotiate this point or the amount of the discount.  In the end he lost the sale over $30.  (That a so-called “open box” item would have its box, manual, and accessories and, moreover, only would have been handled by one family, whereas the “floor model” no longer had a box, its accessories, or manual, and had been exposed to anyone and everyone in the store for who knows how long, is the subject of another post.)

The manager was also unwilling to negotiate a trade off the $25 stand (which was included in the sale) for a $25 sustain pedal.  Throughout the hour or so spent in the store we were constantly bombarded by the store’s overly loud rock guitar “in store radio station,” and had to wait several times while the salesman tried to find a box, or other accessories not with the floor model.

By the time the manager nixed the 10% discount it was all too much, and Sibylle walked away from the sale.  

Good Customer Service

After returning home from the abortive attempt at Guitar Center, Sibylle found the same keyboard, for the same price, online at Musicians Buy.  The model she was interested in came with a “free stand and set of headphones.”  Preferring a good sustain pedal instead, Sibylle discovered the site offered one she like for $0.25 more than the original price of the stand and headphones.  Musicians Buy’s online order form provided a field for notes.  She was able to add a note saying that she wanted the digital piano but wanted to substitute the sustain pedal for the stand and headphones.

Today, a call to Musicians Buy confirmed that they were happy and willing to make the swap - for no additional charge.  The call was immediately answered by a person, no “listen carefully our menu has changed” dance with the touch pad on the phone.  The delivery is already in the Fed Ex system and is scheduled for next Wednesday.

The online purchase took but a few minutes, and was for exactly what Sibylle wanted.  No obnoxious music, no waiting around for the salesman or manager, no objections to a substitution, and no confusion about the price.  The contrast to the in-store experience could not have been more pronounced.

The Moral of the Story

By being unyielding about the differences between a “floor model” and an “open box item,”  and by not acknowledging the time Sibylle had already spent in his store, the manager lost the sale.  Whether or not a single lost sale will hurt his monthly revenue isn’t the point.  His resistance to seeing the customer’s viewpoint and, in effect his refusal to spend $30, cost him the sale, and the good will and future recommendations Sibylle will now be making for Musicians Buy. 

Investments aren’t always black and white, sometimes there are intangibles worth far more than the immediately visible dollars spent or saved. In a day and age when a few minutes online can get you outstanding, personal customer service, I am not sure that the brick and mortar stores can safely cling to an outdated “take it or leave it” attitude.

Tags: customer service

Kansas City employs digital information signs on the Interstate highways that traverse and circumnavigate the city, which usually display travel times to major intersections or landmarks.  Very useful for regular commuters making their daily trek to or from work.  In the summertime these signs display information about ozone alerts, and, when necessary, there are Amber alerts or accident reports displayed. For the past two weeks a new message has graced several of the signs I go past on my daily commute.  A message which reads

Aggressive Driving Enforcement, April 1 - 15

Honest. I’m sure that everyone translates this properly in their head to mean, aggressive driving will be ticketed and not the written meaning.  Still, I think a better phrase would be

Aggressive Driving Ticketing, April 1 - 15

Tags: grammar, language

Downtown Kansas City is experiencing a bit of a renaissance culturally and otherwise.  The city has poured a lot of money into the new Power and Light district, with the new Sprint Center as the centerpiece.  New restaurants are opening, and all the old buildings, seemingly, are being converted into lofts.

Quick, what’s the image that comes to mind when you hear “lofts?”  The place where Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze lived in Ghost, right? One large space with no partitions or walls.  Me too. The problem is that isn’t what loft appears to mean in KC.  Here, loft means “condominium where the walls don’t reach the ceiling and there’s brick, exposed duct work, and massively expensive parking.

Sibylle and I have toured two downtown lofts recently, and while we liked the first somewhat (didn’t care for the second at all), neither of us is ready to give up living in suburbia for a tony downtown address.  Today’s example was, in a word, ugly.  Except for reasonably close access to the new Power and Light district, it had nothing to make it appealing.  When I asked the real estate agent, on the elevator up to the models, if these were lofts or condos, she insisted they were lofts.  ”The walls don’t go to the ceilings.”

I’m probably splitting hairs about this, but walls that don’t reach the ceiling do not a loft make.

Tags: downtown, loft, real estate

Walk into any store-front Chinese restaurant and order a fried rice variant, be it shrimp, chicken, pork, or combination, and you’ll get almost exactly the same thing, regardless of where you are.  Rice, cubed carrots, peas, some onion perhaps, soy sauce, and the meat of your choice.  Oh, and soy sauce for color and flavor. The portion will be sufficiently large to fill you and then some, for less than $10.  Probably less than half that at lunchtime. 

McDonald’s has made an industry out of serving you the same tasteless meal regardless of which of the billions and billions of franchises you visit.  Consistency makes them popular; there’s none of the “I don’t know what to get” angst at McDonald’s.  Fried rice is the quiet consistency meal at budget Chinese restaurants.  For that matter, most of the menu is consistent from one Chinese restaurant to the next.

What sets the Chinese consistency apart, to my way of thinking, from McDonald’s or any of the national fast food chain marquees, is that they are universally independent.  They tend to be family run affairs rather than an organized collection of locations leveraging economies of scale.  

They are an example of emergent behavior, of bottom up organization.  Somehow the word went out that Americans expect rice, carrot, peas, onion, soy sauce, and a bit of chicken, shrimp, or pork in their fried rice.  Which leaves me with this question:  did the Chinese restauranteurs shape our expectation of fried rice, or did we shape their menu offering through demand?

Tags: consistency, emergent, expectation

All of us have heard of the “six degrees of separation” theory, which implies that you can get from any person on the planet to any other person on the planet with only six intervening connections.  For example, I know my father, whose best friend, in turn, is a former Washington DC lobbyist, and has met with former President Bush.  Therefore I’m only four degrees of separation away any number of world leaders.  That and $5 will get you a tall coffee at Starbuck’s.

The professional networking site, LinkedIn, capitalizes on geometric growth of connections by letting you leverage the connections your connection’s connections have.  At only three degrees of separation my network had approximately 1,839,200 links.  My contacts included fifty-nine people.  The aggregate of their connections was roughly 11,700 more people.  Those second-generation connections in turn produced the final one point eight million number.  Somewhat staggering to conceive.

I tell you all of this because I pruned my connections on LinkedIn today.  There were three old connections that I was always a little uneasy about, which I removed.  They were all technology recruiters with whom I’d had some contact while looking for new consulting engagements 3 years ago.  Since I had never met them, and since the relationship hadn’t borne any fruit (i.e., no job), I dropped the link we shared.  Each of the three had the “500+” designation behind their names in my contact list; meaning they each had more that 500 links.  

It would stand to reason then that my second-generation pool would shrink by at least 1500 people.  In actuality it shrunk more than 83%, from 11,700+ to 1,900+.  The third-generation drop was almost exactly the same percentage. There I went from 1,839,200+ connections to 283,500+ connections, a change of 84%.

In the book Linked, the author,  Albert-László Barabási, introduces the idea of a power curve.  Unlike a Bell curve, where the majority of the population has the same, or nearly the same, value, a power curve represents the situation where a very few have all the value, and most have almost no value at all.  There are a handful of web sites (Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft) that garner the most visits, while the vast majority (Zanshin included) collect only a trickle of visitors

It seems that human networks operate on the same principles as the Internet.  Three people out of fifty-nine is only 5%, and yet they accounted for 84% of the total links available to me.  Barabási explores both the six degrees of separation idea, and the fact that some people are nexus or collection points for connections while others aren’t.  I, apparently, am not a collection point for connections, which makes me wonder how much the 2nd, and 3rd generation counts dropped for those people who have me as a contact as a result of my pruning today.

Tags: linkedin, networking, six degrees

Every year for the past twenty-four years I have prepared my own taxes.  For many years my income and filing status allowed me to use the 1040-EZ form, eventually I graduated to the infamous 1040 Long Form.  In 2000, after going into business for myself I was introduced to self employment tax, Schedule C and other forms I care not to remember now.  For the past several years I have lived in one state while working in another, and for much of that time I had an employer who only withheld tax for the state where he was located, not where I was actually working.

This year, like every year before it, I set out to prepare my taxes once again.  With a copy of Turbo Tax downloaded and installed, along with the state editions for Kansas and Missouri I ran through the entire interview, even the sections I knew wouldn’t apply.  The results were far better than last years, but still not quite what I had expected.

After letting it sit for a day I sat down again last night and started over fresh in a new return.  After completing the interview I had different results.  Worse than now not knowing which set of returns was correct, I had no idea what answers I had changed or what had changed the results.

Sibylle, being self-employed, has an accountant who prepares her tax returns.  She compiles in a couple of hours (due to good record keeping throughout the year) a summary of her expenses and income and Gary does the rest.  We dropped her information off on Saturday morning and Thursday afternoon she picked up the completed forms.  This was my first encounter with accountant prepared taxes, and I must say I liked what I saw; I liked the lack of stress and worry.

So last evening after fumbling around in depths of two state returns, multiple sources of income, and questions that I have no frame of reference to understand, much less answer accurately, I threw in the towel.  Today we are making an appointment to submit the necessary financial information to Gary so that he can compile my taxes.  I had originally dismissed this idea as I didn’t want to spend the money on preparation costs.  However I am now seeing the cost as buying far more than the preparation.  It buys peace of mind and a sense of relief.

Taxes don’t need to be emotionally draining, and physically upsetting.  When I owned a home I had an electrician, and heating/cooling contractor, and a plumber I called when I needed work done.  I know how to do those household maintenance chores but I preferred to pay an expert.  It’s time to start paying an expert to manage the mandatory annual reconciliation with the federal government. 

Tags: finances, taxes